: Re: Brands to use, brands not to use Inspired by GGx's question Will traditional publishers force you to remove brands? I would probably not want to mention a brand name of a small brand in my

@Annie587

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Short answer: Yes.

I see little value in a reference to a small, local brand. No one outside of your area is going to recognize it. If you write, "Bob stopped by Starbucks", well, even people who don't patronize Starbucks probably know it's a coffee shop, and have some idea what sort of coffee shop, you don't need to explain further. But if you say, "Bob dropped by Frabnars" ... maybe everybody who lives in your town knows that's a coffee shop, but to everyone else, is that an auto parts store? a drug store? a strip club? Who knows? You'd have to explain what sort of place it is. And if you've got to explain, what's the gain of using a real place over an invented place? I suppose if Frabnars is owned by your brother-in-law and you want to throw in a reference to it as free advertising or a kind of inside joke, okay, but that's about the only value I can see.

I just hit something analogous while proof-reading a book for a relative. He mentioned that he had worked at a certain store many years ago, and then said that back then it was just the one store but "of course now they're on every street corner". Well I had never heard of the place. I looked it up, and it turns out that they have many stores in Tennessee ... but that's it, none outside the state. So to anyone familiar with Tennessee, it may well be a well-known store. But to anyone else, they have no idea. (At my suggestion he changed it to "of course now they're all over Tennessee".)

Companies come and go all the time, so even a brand that is well-known today could become dated. Compuserve and AOL were the industry leaders in on-line services not too long ago. Now ... is Compuserve even still in business? Kodak was practically synonymous with photography. Pan American used to be one of the biggest airlines in the world. Hey, there used to be a country called "the Soviet Union".

You mention the examples of soft drinks and cars. I think those are two very interesting examples.

There are a fairly small number of car manufacturers in the US, and everybody knows who they are. If you said that a character in your story is driving a Doodlebitz, I think most readers would find that disconcerting. There is no such brand of car, and the reader knows it.

But soft drinks are a little different. There are a few big ones that everybody knows. I haven't taken a survey but I'd be surprised if you could find many Americans who haven't heard of Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Sprite, and a handful of others. But there are also other, smaller brands out there. I can think of Faygo and RC. And I just found a list that includes many I never heard of before today: Cheerwine and Kinnie and Moxie. If you wrote in a story, "Bob picked up a 2-liter bottle of Doodlebitz cola", I doubt many readers would be taken aback. 99% wouldn't know if it was a real brand or not.

But as Neil Fein says, sometimes NOT using a super-well-known brand sounds odd. I saw a TV show a few years back where there were several scenes where characters wanted to look something up on the Internet, and they said, "Let's Bing it". I wonder if Microsoft paid them for that. I use Bing regularly, but it sounded very odd to me. Maybe it's the crowd I hang out with, but I have never heard someone say, "Let's Bing that."

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