Kodak is an international company, a household brand and had nearly 11 billion dollars in sales in 2006.

And it's got an odd name.

I assumed for a long time that it was a family name, or a carefully devised name based on market research and popular trends.

Actually, it's because the guy who founded Kodak really liked the letter "K." Or more accurately, he thought the letter K was strong. The rest of the word, in part, was decided upon because the name couldn't be mispronounced.

I love this story because it sounds so unlikely and because it's so far from how things are often done now.

(For the curious, I first came across the origins of the word Kodak in a Bill Bryson book — Made in America. It's an immensely entertaining book filled with endlessly diverting and frequently useless knowledge.)

I'm reading Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars. The premise is fascinating.

This is oversimplified, but his argument is that to market a product effectively, marketers have to come up with a story for consumers. The story needs to be genuine (which isn't quite the same thing as true). He also says that the easiest stories to tell are the ones that fit with the world view consumers already hold.

In the past, I've read about how people tend to think in stories. This makes sense to me. For instance, when people talk about their day, they don't deliver fragmented information unless it is part of a larger story, e.g. how many pieces of paper they stapled (unless it was way too many), how much coffee they drank (unless it gave them an opportunity to talk to the attractive new office mate), or how much ink they have left in their pen (unless it's part of a Dilbert Catch-22).

People also apparently tend to pay attention to information that supports their previously held opinions, but disregard information that doesn't. I'd heard this before, but it comes up in Godin's book.

So the idea that people think in self-reinforcing stories and that it's a potentially powerful marketing technique fits well with what I've learned in the past, which makes it easier for Godin to convince me it's true. This amuses me.

In all seriousness, though, this is an incredibly interesting book and well worth a read. It's got to be hard to apply to some products, but a useful exercise.

It also ties in nicely with a post over at advertising practitioner about the inconsistent story being told by Dove, Lynx and their parent company.

This has fallen a little to the wayside recently, but when I started this blog I wrote more about design. I've found through experience what most marketers know — good design can have a huge impact on the success of a piece.

So I was interested to see a post over at Neuromarketing about the effect of the Golden Mean on people's perceptions of art. As is usual for me, I'm not entirely convinced by the research, but they write:

"From a neuromarketing standpoint, it’s interesting to know that a positive response to specifically proportioned shapes is built into our brains. ... graphic designers and commercial artists should be aware of our brains’ preference for this proportion and use it when appropriate."

Awhile ago, I put up a post about NPR's program "This Is Your Brain on Commercials." I noted that the title has a distinct similarity to the old anti-drug campaign "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs."

So I was amused to see a New York Times article called "This Is Your Brain on Politics."

Clearly something about this is irresistible to journalists.

The ad campaign these titles are referencing dates back to 1987. Incredibly simple ad, but very effective. So much so that it's become part of popular culture.

That's good advertising.

I'm at the tail end of writing up copy for a commercial website, so articles about writing for the web keep catching my eye. (I wrote in a couple previous posts about the strategy and structure of web writing.)

I just found some down-to-earth advice on editing your own work by copyblogger. The author points out it's tough to do, and she's completely right.

It's tempting to assign it to ego — the subconscious belief that most people have that whatever they do is great and blinds them to their own faults (for more this, check out this post from NeuroMarketing). I think, though, that what gets most people is that they read what is not there. When people re-read their copy, their thought process is so obvious to them, they miss that it might not be obvious to everyone else. (This tendency would certainly explain some of the emails that get sent back and forth.)

In the post, she makes some great suggestions about how to get around the editing mental block.

On the Media from NPR recently ran a piece called "Your Brain on Commercials." (This sounds like a reference to the famous anti-drug commercials with the tag line: 'This is your brain on drugs.')

A company called EmSense hooks people up to a machine and then records how their brain responds while they watch an ad. The goal is to work out how people are really responding, not how they say they are responding. In the example NPR uses, EmSense could determine what portions of the ad produced a negative reaction in the test subject (in this case, the reporter).

Sounds good, doesn't it? Just hook someone up and you'll know exactly what they're thinking. But these are not mind-reading machines; all they're tracking are bodily reactions. The "whys" of the reaction are unknown (and so far unknowable) relying just on a machine.

There's a societal tendency to look at high tech equipment and the trappings of science and feel that this combination will deliver a truth that is otherwise unknowable. What it actually delivers is a lot of data that is subject to interpretation.

So this approach has some obvious limitations as to the depth of information it provides and the guidance it can give. I'm not saying it's useless — far from it — but it should be used with other more traditional techniques.

There is also a moral question about studying people's brains in action in terms of its invasiveness and how subject it is to abuse. This is a concern, though I doubt the current technology is informative enough for it to be a big problem.