Avoid Puns in Branding

Should your avoid puns in your company or brand name.  While many people don’t find puns funny and they could have a negative impact on you business there are some really great examples of where puns have help a few businesses.  Where does that leave you during the brand naming process?

To pun or not to pun, that is the question?

Below are some examples of businesses using puns, do you think they hurt or help these businesses?

Ok, so some of these pun brands are rather funny and I could see where they would really work for a small business, a Mom-and-Pop shop but our brand development team can’t really see these businesses expanding too far.

Tequila Mockingbird in particular will have trouble expanding because unless they have clear consent of the books publisher, and are paying them royalties, they will get slapped with a Cease and Desist letter.  This is not only a pun it’s a clear violation of a Copyright.

Are Puns Good for Your Brand?

Back to the subject, let’s look at Thai Tanic, you’re going to get a lot of interest with the name, that’s the good part, but that interest needs to be converted into people coming in and business.  You may also have Copyright or Trademark issues with whomever has the rights to the Titanic name.  You may also have issues with victims families or others who think it’s tasteless to name a restaurant after a disaster (pun intended!).

Lord of the Fries is another clear violation of Trademark issues.  The publisher of the book may go after the owners of this place.  Quite a few puns are based on familiar movies, songs or books as two of the three examples above are.  We can really only think of “Cheeseburger in Paradise” which is based on a Jimmy Buffet song where this is done and they pay royalties to Mr. Buffet.

Puns inherently are jokes and they’re meant to make you laugh.  That means your brand, be it a restaurant or business is not going to be taken seriously.  If you’re an up and coming Chef and want to make a name for yourself this is not the way to go.

All that said, we’re here discussing them!

Puns in the right way may work but don’t think about global domination or expansion because puns don’t translate either.  Puns are language and often slang specific, don’t thing of translating them into a different language.  Thai Tanic may work but try Juan in a Million in German, French or Japanese for that matter.

Juan in a Million seams to work.  It doesn’t infringe on any Trademarks that we can think of and can even be translated into Spanish, which is a good part of the world (If it translates, we’re unsure).

With all the great brand names that you can chose from, maybe you should just stick with a powerful brand name for your business.  You can’t go wrong

Have you heard of any pun brand names that have worked?  What about puns that have flopped, either way we’d love to hear them, post them below or join the conversation on our FaceBook page, and like us while you’re there!