I’ve just listened to Retail Therapy from the Ninth Doctor Chronicles and it is based around a weird pink squishy thing that Jackie Tyler is selling. They are called Glubbyglubs.
The silliness of the name is commented on by the Doctor but it made me think about brands in Doctor Who. Obviously they are always made up but they never, to me, sound like convincing brand names that would exist in the real world. They always sound too silly, or too twee or too odd.
Some like Bubbleshock in the first episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures, just about sound passable but often the name pulls me out of the story a bit. It’s a variation on Bubbleshake from The Highest Science but when I think about popular drinks being called simple things like Prime or Pepsi are those names just too on the nose?
Of course now I’ve writtent this post I can’t think of any other examples but I know they exist because it’s something which often bugs me.
Is it just me? Which brand names do you think sound ‘real’?
VOR was the company from spyfall, but a lot of their products were named after it (including their search engine and I’d count Google as a brand not just a company)
It’s pronounced the same way as the word ‘Vore’ though, which (NSFW warning)is a fetish involving swallowing someone else, or being swallowed, most commonly used in furry communities, but definitely not exclusively.
Both are kind of “buzz-wordy” that makes people believe they are doing something good for the environment or their health.
@deltaandthebannermen “Prime”, isn’t that basically Vitex in this reality?
(My son has had a couple of those that I’ve tasted, how do people keep it down?)
Magpie Electricals is iconic and I believe Tommy Connolly ended up becoming its CEO. Which is why he did’nt became a Companion.
Recently we’ve (my and my family) noticed a lot of brands IRL have somewhat long names and short names (like “Luvic” “Caris” “Demor” etc.) would be seen as too short for a brand name.
But a lot of the alien names do sound more like a brand than a believable alien name. There’s never anyone named K’zp’ilt’ktn but a lot of people with five letters names that end in consonant if male or in a if female.
I don’t recall hearing or seeing any alien brand names, although logically Marinus and Manussa (or whatever) would have their own brands. So it’s possible their brand names sound better in their languages.
Joseph Serf has launched his new SerfBoard, the must-have computer that no one can resist owning. Everyone wants the brand new device — and why not? What could be so dangerous about a computer?
I’m sorry, that’s awful lol.
And a similar vein to ATMOS and S. TRIAD Technologies, it’s a “billionaire tech genius will take over the world with their stupidly named technology”.
On the inverse, I think “Dot and Bubble” is very clever, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that technology would be called if it were by a real company (eg. Apple has “Vision Pro”, Facebook had “Oculus”, Snapchat had “Spectacles” - just really simple names that don’t sound like they were invented by a pre-teen).
