What’s in a brand name? From Beechams to Brasso

Showering the other day, I noticed a visitor had left his shampoo behind. Going through the familiar ablutions I stared glassily, half-focused on the immediate foreground, in the way you do when your activity requires some but not all of your attention. Vosene. The trade name started running through my mind. I repeated it to myself out loud. ‘Vosene’. What an odd title for a shampoo. It sounded cold, clinical, antiseptic, perhaps a little harsh: a nod more in the direction of hygiene than of the soft, caring, nurturing image that more recently branded hair products aim to convey.

I bet (I thought, remembering my 1950s bedroom wall poster of nuclear power stations) that Vosene is a mid-20th-century brand name. It has the ring of science about it: for in those days ‘science,’ ‘scientific’ and even ‘chemical’ were hooray-words. Science was the future, science was making our lives better, leading the way. The men in white coats were on our side. There was not that shudder that now comes with the idea of rule-by-science. Nobody would come up with the name Vosene to brand what is basically a cosmetic product today.

A similar bathroom-based reverie returned in Spain last month, in my family’s house. The toothpaste on the shelf was called Eurodont. How clearly (I thought) this marks the difference between the way we British now see the European Union, and the cachet it carries in Spain where Europe is still cool: associated with modernity, democracy, an end to isolation and the bad old days of fascist dictatorship. You wouldn’t in Britain name a toothpaste ‘Eurodont’ any more than you’d name a moisturiser ‘Euromilk’ or a toilet paper ‘Europamper’.

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But even with us there was a brief period in the 1970s, before we British made up our minds that Europe was a nuisance rather than a boon, when manufacturers did prefix ‘Euro’ to their products on the supposition that this would give the brand an air of being futuristic.