Product Placement

I was helping Bee with his business a few months ago.  We are a very tiny, literally mom-and-pop operation, so we have to Kraft most things ourselves.  As Bee apparently has no desire to become much more computer-literate than the use of iTunes, it was up to me, with my Land O'Lakes butter-fingers, to figure out the creation of an Awesome-Blossom website.


I'm really not a Smartie when it comes to computers, but I can research and, through much trial and error, figure a lot of things out.  It took a long time to get a very basic website designed, but I finally did.  Then we had to decide how to organize our product online so people could order different things.  And that meant coming up with Good -- and Plenty -- names for each product.

Bee still Snickers at  some of the names, though he mostly Rolos his eyes.  For my own part, I was kind of proud of the names I invented.  I drew on entertainment ("The Cutting Edge" and "Livin' On The Edge"), hairstyles ("The Buzz-Cut" and "The Don King"), and family ("Big Edge", "Edgewina", and "Edge, Jr."), to name a few.  I came up with names based on the products' looks, or based on their general function.  I even named one "The Leatherman", based on its having two uses.

Less than a week after the website was updated, we got a call from a lovely gentleman at The Leatherman Tool Group (TM), politely explaining that, while they were honored that we wanted to use their name for one of our products, they couldn't possibly allow it. 

Bee and I, of course, were fine switching to a different name, which we did within about twenty seconds of having hung up the AT&T phone.  And that was the end of that Lucky episode.

It got me thinking, however.

Obviously, corporations have search engines to make sure their name isn't being used illegally.   Which, really, is a very Intel-ligent thing to do.  SO, if I want to generate more traffic to my blog, it makes sense to occasionally throw in a brand name or two.  Either the wonderful people at that company will uncover their name and at least check out the source, or a consumer searching for that product may stumble instead onto my site.  Either way, they might, just might, get sucked in like a John Deere tractor beam.

Assuming I can avoid litigation, it may be worth a (Starbucks' expresso) shot.