Domino’s Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Via a strategically reasoned press release:

MINNEAPOLIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Zikula™, an open source software, was named by Strategic Name Development, a global brand naming consultancy that develops brand names, product names, company names, logos, and conducts global brand name research.

The Zikula brand name was created from several Zulu words, one of the official languages of South Africa, where “Zila ukudla” means fast and “Lula” means easy, which are the main attributes of the software.

The other top-of lexicon-official-lanuages of South Africa are: Afrikaans (Afrikaans), English, Ndebele (isiNdebele), Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa), Sotho (Sesotho), Swati (siSwati), Tsonga (Xitsonga), Tswana (Setswana), Venda (Tshiven?a), and Xhosa (isiXhosa). Can’t wait to see what Strategic Name Development does with those.

Experience the real Africa at the Zikula website.

I have been following the story of the murder of Sue Daniels since it hit the local papers in November. The titillating story surrounding her relationship with the man who stalked and killed her, Niklan Jones-Lezama (who subsequently committed suicide himself), was only part of the saga that attracted me to her. Sue Daniels was a political activist. She was also a research associate at Virginia Tech, working on a PHD in biology.

I would categorize her political activities as being on the far left; as far left as one can recede before picking up a weapon and calling for the revolution of the proletariat. The “power to the people” kind of crowd. Here is what was written about her “activism” prior to her reporting to federal prison in November after having been found guilty of trespassing on government property (at Ft. Benning) during a protest of America’s involvement in Central and South America…

Sue and I lived together for four amazing years. There’s more, if you can stomach it, here.

“All because the lady loves… Milk Tray”, that’s why. Leading UK chocolatier Cadbury had been successfully branding chocolate both for women and by using women in its ads to promote chocolate’s sensual side.One of Cadbury’s most popular TV spots featured a suave cat burglar scaling a building, fighting off danger, using 007- like gadgets etc, all in an effort to leave a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates on a sleeping woman’s night table. The spots ended with the tagline, “And all because the lady loves Milk Tray”

Nestle countered with the “It’s not for girls” campaign, running spots of woman disguised as men in desperate attempts to buy a Yorkie. Of course the wily male candy clerk would trip them up, resulting in no sale. The Yorkie spots would end with a swarthy construction worker type manhandling a Yorkie bar. Sort of a Brit version of Toffeefay’s old “Toffeefay, it’s too good for kids” campaign.

Nintendo officially ditched its long-used codename for its next generation machine Thursday, revealing Wii as the final name for the product. Pronounced like “we” (or “whee,” I suppose), the name is meant to emphasize that “this console is for everyone,” Nintendo said in a flash video which introduced the name change…

…The unusual spelling is meant to symbolize both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play…

…The core gaming community is already making its opinion known – and it’s a resounding thumbs down.

“Here, I’ll do it: Worst console name ever,” wrote Chris Remo, an editor at Shacknews.com, whose sentiments were immediately echoed by dozens of users. Forum members on Gamespot.com, IGN.com and other gaming sites expressed similar thoughts…

…By letting the gaming community vent now about the name, they will be less distracted as launch titles for the system are announced and initial reports about what it’s like to play the games begin to come in.

Wii has got to be the most savvy name announcement we have seen in many years, and it could be the most viral name announcement since Yahoo! Sure, the buzz is a all negative (News, Blogosphere) but that’s part of the beauty.

Because we don’t believe that Wii is the real name. We think Nintendo is setting you all up to be Punk’d at E3, generating a massive amount of positive buzz when the scam and the real new name are announced.

Crazy? Here is the first clue, “By letting the gaming community vent now about the name, they will be less distracted as launch titles for the system are announced and initial reports about what it’s like to play the games begin to come in.” Allowing your audience time to vent is not SOP in a name announcement, and also telegraphs that Nintendo knows what a stinker this name would be. Second, it’s not possible to engineer a worse name for this product.

Third, and this is a big one, there are no trademarks registered by Nintendo nor by any dummy corp in the U.S or over there for Wii. This is unprecedented for Nintendo and it is not possible that this is an oversight. If Wii were the name, they would have registered it. In fact, no new trademarks have been registered by Nintendo at all. This leads us to conclude that Nintendo has in fact registered the real name under a dummy corp, which is SOP when trying to keep a name a secret prior to launch.

Given that their video game audience is the same demographic as Punk’d, this whole campaign is perversely elegant. Except of course for failing to make the illusion complete by registering a TM for Wii.

Keep in mind, this whole PR campaign cost zero dollars. And yet, some “naming experts” just don’t seem to get it.

More blogs about Rockwell Retro Encabulator

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Still, it could be worse. Bill O’Reilly could be getting laid this year – in Nevada anyway.

That visual should stop those sugar plums from dancing in your head.

MILL VALLEY, Calif. – Tommy Odom’s remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon. When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures – literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.

Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which “each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank,” said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.

Finally, a chance for you to do at least one good thing before you die, almost. And most convenient for this blogger, as Forever Ferwood sits atop a hill not 300 yards from my new home. This development does, however, put a stall in my plans to have a well dug in the backyard.

The name “Forever Fernwood” is compelling, and prods us to dig into the forensic etymology of the name of pop culture blip “Fernwood 2-Night”, a television show which starred Martin Mull way back in 1978. Mr. Mull spent a good amount of time in Mill Valley and its surrounding county of Marin, in fact he starred in the film “Serial”, an adaptation of the book “The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County”. As described by Wikipedia:

The Serial is divided into 52 short chapters and it chronicles the lives, loves, and relationships of a number of residents, mostly in their mid-to-late 30s and their 40s, of Marin County, a suburban, generally very affluent county directly across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The plot revolves around Harvey and Kate Holroyd, a couple in the midst of the mid-1970s Marin lifestyle who are undergoing marital problems, although there are many other characters introduced and described throughout the novel.

There are elements of soap opera in the book, although the tone is comedic (specifically, satirical) rather than tragic. The novel describes its characters’ lifestyles, including their interest in various New Age beliefs and human potential movement groups (including est, transcendental meditation, consciousness-raising, and rebirthing); their unconventional and arguably lax child-rearing techniques; and their embrace of a number of then-current fads, such as fern bars, jogging, and organic food. The book satirizes many of the elements of a particular mid-to-late 1970s subculture, also described to some degree by author Tom Wolfe in his 1976 non-fiction essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, particularly as manifested in the lives of people then between the ages of about 30 and 45 in affluent parts of California.

Many of the characters in The Serial also speak using a particular jargon or lexicon, saying words and phrases like “flash on” (a phrasal verb meaning to “have a sudden insight about”), “Really” (to signify assent), and others.

The Serial contains a great number of specific references to actual locations (restaurants, stores, streets) in 1970s Marin County. In the original edition of the book, and in most if not all later editions, black-and-white illustrations of scenes from the novel accompany the text in many of the chapters.

So was Fernwood 2-Night named after the cemetery Forever Fernwood? You might think it too big a stretch, until deeper digging reveals this bone chip about t.v. show “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”:

…a few of the supporting cast who appeared in the series
included Martin Mull, Orson Bean, Dabney Coleman, Shelley
Berman, Shelley Fabares, Richard Hatch and Tab Hunter;
the series was first run as a syndicated series, and then
was picked up for late-night broadcast on the “CBS Late Movie”
when they ran out of movies; after Louise Lasser left the
series, the title was changed to reflect the name of the
fictional town…

“Forever Fernwood”

Later, after “Forever Fernwood” ran out of steam, producer
Norman Lear extended the franchise even further by creating
creating a fictional local talk show as fodder for even more
satire, called “Fernwood 2-Night”

So there you have it. And no, we don’t have anything better to do.

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The hot word in the field of sales — indeed, pervading the world of perfect pitching — is brand.

”The King Is Dead, Long Live His Brand” is the Times headline above an article about the way ”Michael Jordan is being mortalized so his sneakers can stay in the game.” That’s because ”building a brand on the back of a legend works only until that back breaks.”

The noun blazed on the scene a thousand years ago as a burning stick, and the meaning soon transferred to the mark left on the skin of a horse or a criminal by such a stick, or branding iron. That mark became the sign of infamy: Richard Hooker wrote in 1597 of an age marked ”with the brand of error and superstition,” and later, a firebrand became the symbol of an inflammatory rabble-rouser.

The burned-in mark, in the 19th century, began to signify ownership not just of an animal but also of liquids in wooden casks, like wine or ale. The brand-mark became a ”trademark,” and in the 20th century the designated item so labeled became a brand. In 1929, Fleischmann’s Yeast absorbed the coffee maker Chase & Sanborn and other companies to form Standard Brands (now a part of Kraft), in hopes that brand names would produce brand loyalty. A generation later, David Ogilvy, the advertising executive, was dubbed by the author Martin Mayer in 1958 as an ”apostle of the ‘brand image”’ who sought to persuade the consumer ”that brand A, technically identical with brand B, is somehow a better product.” Within two years, the novelist Kingsley Amis extended brand image from a product to a genre: ”mad scientists attended by scantily clad daughters” constitute ”the main brand-image of science fiction.”

…”It’s a new brand world,” wrote Tom Peters in the magazine Fast Company in 1997, playing on the compound adjective brand-new. In an article titled ”The Brand Called You,” Peters argued that ”the main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents . . . looking to establish your own microequivalent of the Nike swoosh. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.”

Well before the blogosphere became a media power, Peters held that ”the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could. . . . So how do you know which sites are worth visiting? The answer: branding. The sites you go back to are the sites you trust. . . . The brand is a promise of the value you’ll receive.” His article helped project a new sense of the word into common usage, as he suggested ways for individuals to self-brand by focusing on the values (of imagination or budgetary dependability, of creative talent or personal charm) that make an individual’s brand unique.

We now have a Brandweek magazine, and a Web site aimed at what used to be called ”Madison Avenue” named Brand Republic. Basketball teams, rock bands and celebrities rise and fall as brands. Business Week headlines a story about Yahoo’s attempt to establish itself in foreign markets with ”Exporting an Über-Brand.”

In a world where the words new and fresh are relentlessly repeated on every product label, the name of the sales technique is getting old and stale. Where is the ad-Übermensch, the creative Ogilvy, who will put forward a new moniker for the name of the atmospheric marketing game? The time has come, as John Kerry puts it, to unbrand the word brand.

Safire then gets a little cranky and goes on to pick a bone with Yahoo! for forcing the terminal exclamation point on him, and vows that from now on when he has to use the name in print he will write it with a question mark instead: Yahoo?

More interestingly, the redoubtable language maven makes a good point in his lambasting of a particularly egregious dot com-era naming convention, “internal capitalization”, as well as tracking down the Eve that birthed this monster:

BlackBerry, appropriating the name of the fruit of a bramble bush, sports what is called ”internal capitalization” to make the brand name distinctive. That’s the next worst thing in corporate nomenclature, stemming like kudzu from the 1951 TelePrompTer. Entranced by the symmetry of two five-letter groups beginning with b, the corporate namers capitalized both, turning a proper noun improper, at least in my book.

What reason do I have to resist this sly typographic mind-manipulation? As Shakespeare put it in ”Henry IV, Part I”: ”If reasons were as plenty as Black-berries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.” (The Bard wrote the word as ”Black-berries,” with initial cap and hyphen. Four centuries ago, that was O.K.)

Ultimately, internal capitalization is unnecessary and distracting. Blackberry is a perfect name for a diminutive email device that looks like a blackberry; ‘BlackBerry’ serves no purpose and just dilutes the power of the brand.

Lucky was born in 1964. Lucky’s full name is L.C. Leprechaun, and he touts his cereal as being “Magically Delicious.” Lucky the Leprechaun magically changes ordinary, shapeless white marshmallows into shapes with bright colors. Originally he put the pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers into Lucky Charms cereal. In 1975 he added blue diamonds. Purple horseshoes arrived in 1984. Red balloons were added in 1989.

In 1991 the star-in-balloon replaced both the red balloon and the orange star. A blue, yellow and pink rainbow was added in 1992. The yellow and orange Pot of Gold replaced the yellow moon in 1994. New brighter colors were introduced in 1995 along with the return of the moon, only now it is blue! And the star was changed from a 6-point to 5-point shape. A dark green clover in a light green hat replaced the green clover in 1996.

The primary marshmallow shapes, as of January 1999, became: red balloons, blue moons, pink hearts, multi-colored rainbows, yellow and white shooting stars, Lucky’s green hat with a green clover, orange and yellow pot of gold, and purple horseshoes.

As the story goes, a predatory whale swirled the colors on the marshmallows in 1986, and was subsequently “punished” by being turned into a rainbow-colored whale marshmallow for a limited time. Green pine trees were featured as an Earth Day promotion, and an annual Christmas version of Lucky Charms includes festive holiday marshmallows. Olympic “Marbits” (1996) and “Twisted” (1997) two-color shapes: Pot of Gold, Moon, Balloon, Horseshoe, and Heart have been boxed.

In early 1999, General Mills celebrated an “Around the World Event” with globally famous marshmallow shapes. These are: green and yellow torch, gold pyramid, blue Eiffel Tower, orange Golden Gate Bridge, purple Liberty Bell, pink and white Leaning Tower of Pisa, red and white Big Ben clock, and green and white Alps.

Later in 1999, they went back to their previous shapes except they modified the blue moons by giving them a yellow mouth and called them “Man in the Moon”. This promotion featured Lucky wearing a green space suit with a bubble helmet.

Come 2003, the primary marshmallow shapes were: pink hearts, orange stars, green clovers-in-hats, blue moons, purple horseshoes, red balloons, orange and yellow pots of gold, and 3-color rainbows. Bigger marshmallows followed.

Lucky Charms was the first cereal to include marshmallow pieces (technically called “marbits”). Marbits were invented by John Holahan in 1963.

Waldo the Wizard:General Mills attempted to replace L. C. Leprechaun in the mid-1970′s. Waldo the Wizard, a man in a green wizard’s cap and gown (and black sneakers on his feet), appeared on boxes in 1975. Waldo was created by Alan Snedeker, and designed by Phil Mendez. It was a test to find a replacement for the leprechaun. Officially, Waldo proved to be less popular than “Lucky” and magically disappeared from boxes one year later.

An inside source tells us, “In fact, Waldo the Wizard actually scored far better than Lucky the Leprechaun in focus group tests. The entire project started because kids (and therefore the client) got tired of Lucky. Despite Waldo’s success, which I was told was considerable; the client got cold feet.”

“Not only did Waldo beat Lucky in focus groups,” confirms another source, “it was test marketed in New England with great success”.

“They [General Mills] worried about losing the “equity” they had in Lucky, though at the time it couldn’t have been much if they initiated a new character search, produced and aired commercials, rather than just running storyboards past focus groups as a disaster check.”

Now that you have a craving for a delicious bowl of marbits, get thee to a pub!