mcld.co.uk

The reason I wrote about corporate noun-phrase reversal was because I saw an advert for Heinz beans, which reminded me of that old topic.

Heinz has started calling its beans "Beanz" instead of "Beans". Any reason? Well, it's completely transparent really: the word "beans" can't be trademarked, but indeed if you search the UK trademark website you'll find that Beanz is registered to H.J. Heinz Company, Limited. Not surprising or evil, but just silly.

Now they're pushing the concept slightly further. The advert I'm reading says: "[W]e've renamed them Heinz Supreme Beanz". That's a silly name (reminds me of chicken supreme) but presumably it's a step in the strategy of moving the brand away from the generic name which other manufacturers are free to use. If they can successfully get people to refer to the brand with their trademarked name then it makes it easier to keep the competition at bay. I don't expect the name will actually stick, but we'll see...

It's interesting to watch the way companies bend the English language to try and fit with certain corporate goals (including trademarks and globalisation). A while ago I noticed a phenomenon that I called "corporate noun-phrase reversal" because it looked like companies were starting to change the order of English phrases. For example, "Muller Fruit Corner" changed to "Muller Corner Fruit"; "Original Mint Source" changed to "Original Source Mint"; "Ice-cream Mars" changed to "Mars Ice-cream". To my mind all these new versions are slightly bizarre and make less sense (especially "Original Source Mint" which gets rid of the pun on mint sauce, which is presumably why they came up with that name in the first place). So why do it?

One suggestion has been about internationalisation, because (a) many languages (e.g. many of the European languages) put their adjectives after their nouns, and (b) many people buying the products may not have a first-language grasp on the words used. So if you have a big factory for globally-distributed product, it might make economical sense to print your labels with only one word-order. In a sense it's the same phenomenon as locally-branded things (Marathon, Haze) taking on the name that everyone else in the word knows the brand by (Snickers, Air Wick), irrespective of which brand name sounds better to English ears.

I think a more important factor is probably "sub-branding" (if that's a word). "Muller Corner Fruit" happened shortly after "Muller Corner Crunch" and other variants came into being, so the word order has an important consequence: "Muller Corner" becomes a brand that can be easily extended into new varieties ("Muller Corner Vegetable"? hehe) and can be more easily trademarked, referred to in literature, etc. Similarly, "Original Source Mint" only happened after the company had branched out into a whole set of scented things, most of which wouldn't benefit from the mint-sauce pun...