I wish they made a blog post about how they came about to think that Soylent was a good branding name. Having seen the movie, it makes me want to barf just looking at the bottle.
This is not a joke, I actually feel nauseous because of the name.
Me too. I will simply never buy or use this product because of the decisions made about how to name it. Those same processes will more than likely be involved in whats in the stuff as well, and .. yeah .. that just doesn't work for me.
Seriously people, the irony levels are too damn high. This is a case of an absolutely atrocious brand decision being made by people whose hubris are blinding them to the fact that they're insulting themselves, and their customers, by associating their product with cannibalism.
Probably as a joke, but it served them well, it's really a clever name IMHO.
I think it all started as a few blog posts about the founder's experiments in creating his own meal replacement, and after he got crazy media attention he decided to turn it into a product.
Soylent as a name is instantly recognizable and has a sense of self-awareness/irony that many other products lack, I would be surprised if the name itself didn't contribute greatly to the initial media coverage.
I'm inclined to buy it because of the name. I appreciate a company with a good sense of humor.
That, and every time I see a Soylent ad on Facebook, I usually get a good 10+ minutes of amusement from reading the indignant comments about the product's name. To be clear, I have no problem with your stance on the issue; you described your feelings concisely and reasonably. Those FB comments, though....many of them are neither concise nor reasonable.
I think that sometimes, a name that provokes this kind of reaction is a good thing. Maybe it's better to have a product that people either love or hate than for some reason than to have one that everyone is indifferent about.
I quite liked the European competitor's original name, Joylent. To avoid legal issues they eventually changed the name and somehow ended up with "Jimmy Joy". That name was so intensely disliked that they renamed it again in about a month.
The company still seems to be named Jimmy Joy, and the product Plenny Shake. Both somehow strike me as really terrible brand names. Can't find anything about a subsequent rename.
That said, I'm a customer of theirs, and daft names aren't going to change that.
The company is still called Jimmy Joy. We decided to ask the community what the actual product should be called. Since we already had the 'Twenny Bar' we ended up choosing to name it 'Plenny Shake'
Also, lots of people (especially men) avoid anything with "Soy" in it because it is said to contain compounds which mimic estrogen. This was debunked [1], but still, it may hurt marketing.
The movie depicts a future in which nourishment has become purely functional -- not by choice, but because food resources are so scarce. (And to top it off, the function is served by the worst "waste" imaginable).
Now, instead of food, the scarce resource seems to have become time.
I understand that Soylent serves a purpose to some, but I believe we should strive to move away from that dystopian nightmare, instead of succumbing to it.
This is not a joke, I actually feel nauseous because of the name.