What were once Par Kings, Sweet Shots or Play-offs have turned into ProV1s, XL-7000s or B330-RXSs.
The reasoning, Newport discovers, is performance and R&D behind it are what sells gold balls anymore. Better balls, perhaps, with longer flights, but where’s the drama in their trajectories? Certainly not in my game.
A product’s name can mean a lot when making a purchase. I can attest to this, having recently paid double what I’d intended for a guest-room mattress based on its model name. “The Baron” just has the gravitas that lends itself to a good night’s sleep, don’t you think? As opposed to “Earl Marshall,” which would have me up late wondering just who this Marshall character was. As a rule, names of persons are best left off the names of mattress models, if you ask me – and probably if you ask my wife, who I’m betting would not like a mattress called “Charlize Theron” as much as I might. That would be something, though, wouldn’t it ...? In my single days, I would have jumped at the chance to buy the Charlize Theron model mattress.
As it is, in our bedroom — if this is not getting too personal — we have “The Diamond.” I mention this only to conveniently get around to jewelry, which is the point, here, after all. No, wait: I also mention it because we bought that thing five years ago, and I still remember the name. Crazy, huh?
What is you named every piece of jewelry you sold? Not the collection, but the names of each item? They’ve probably got an SKU number and a barcode that look pretty much like a golf ball model, right? Why note give them names like mattresses? As with mattresses, jewelry’s all about the romance, right? We receive all sorts of product shots and descriptions from manufacturers and designers to run in INSTORE and INDESIGN, and it always surprises me that more products don’t have names. That seems like a really simple way to develop a story behind a product.
So if you do custom why not name each piece? You’re an artist, right? And artists who are painters or sculptors always name their works, don’t they?
Or are you going for the performance and R&D angle of golf balls?
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