Thoughts on Brand Names

We often write best about the times and places we inhabit, filling our prose with the little details of our existences. To get there, we sometimes sprinkle the work with brand names. Stephen King does this to good effect, giving the work real-world flavor. His rationale—and it’s a good one—is that a person buys a Pepsi, not a soft drink. However, King runs the risk of readers a hundred years from now having no idea what he’s talking about when he mentions “McDonald’s.” It might be wiser just to say “hamburger joint.” Of course, future readers might have no idea what “hamburger” is either, and once they figure that out, they’re confused as to how it has joints when it doesn’t even have bones.

Why employ brand names at all? It’s not like writers reap additional revenue streams through product placement, like in Hollywood (frankly, product placement strikes me as corporate art and artistic copout…but that’s a debate for another day).

In future settings, brand names for things that don’t exist become even trickier. If you must invent them, make them believable. Like “Cyberdyne” and “Skynet” in the Terminator movies. Those ooze high-tech menace and meaning, so much so that they’ve become a bit of shorthand for scary megalithic companies. If Cyberdyne were instead named “Crazy Eddie’s Discount World Domination,” James Cameron would have perhaps gone too far.

Diamonds are forever. Companies and products are not, and they all have limited shelf-lives. Heck, the Santa Fe Institute found that publicly-traded companies last only around ten years on average.

Habits can change drastically within a single generation. When I was little, every grownup smoked. I remember the family doctor smoking in his office, squinty-eyed through the veil of smoke enveloping his soft round head. That’s a thing of the past and I’m not sure millennials believe me when I tell them about it, right before I yell at them to get off my lawn. But smoking went global after the crash of the Western hemisphere, and will linger on for a while yet. Though Robinson Crusoe smoked centuries ago, we still understand the reference today. In the 20th century, cigarette brands proliferated, and if fictional 1957 hardboiled private eye Nick Hammfist “lit a Camel,” we get it. But if Camel brand disappears and smoking lapses into a forgotten pastime in a hundred years, will readers still understand? Or will they wonder why Nick abused an innocent animal?

The use of brand names also brings legal risks. We live in a litigious society and companies zealously defend their images and reputations. Attorneys for publishers wring their teeth and gnash their hands at the faintest thought of lawsuit. Keep that in mind; sprinkle your fiction with WalMart and Burger King if you must, but consider how you represent those companies. It’s much safer and almost as easy to invent a brand if you need a company or product to smash with your prose (publishers, interestingly, plant that little disclaimer at the beginning that says all people, places, and products in this book are completely fictional and any resemblance to anything real or unreal is purely coincidental and all in your head).

There’s also a risk that an innocuous brand name today may not be so innocuous in two years, and might even impart a different slant to what you’re trying to say. How many companies suffer spectacular falls from grace due to shady dealings? They pop up regularly in the news. Some change their names and resurface with ones. Others disappear completely.

This is not to say brands are bad things to write. They add touches of reality to the work. But reality changes always, sometimes at a glacial pace and sometimes in a hurry, and it colors the work with the latest version reality. So use them wisely and cautiously, and then reward yourself with some Jujyfruits and Vanilla-Flavor Caffeine-Free Diet Coke.