I was taking a rare excursion away from my beloved SciFi channel to see what was polluting the rest of the satellite TV frequencies. In doing so, I discovered that 'American Inventor' is in the final stages of discovering America's next great invention.

As an aside, I wouldn't consider a revamped bicycle built for two, a revamped Simon Says game, or a revamped baby seat (didn't stick around for the 4th invention) to be 'great'. I don't really even consider them inventions. Among America's great engineering and inventing feats, which include the telephone, light bulb, automated assembly line and the Hoover dam, the crap on that series doesn't even come close.

But I digress...

My real focus is that they all had to try and direct a commercial to sell the products. Well, the two I actually saw involved huge egos and no design sense whatsoever. Which goes back to the 'great' thing, and makes me think these people got lucky with one idea. Meh.

I started to think about poor marketing attempts. Engrish.com is a good place to start down that path. Anyway, here in the US, marketing is as close to a science as any profession can get. Tons of money is spent in branding, market research, focus groups, etc. So I wondered what if a large company had a truly novel product, but wanted to market it in relation to an established, well-recognized, and even iconic brand.

Spam.

What if Hormel decided to produce a vegetarian alternative to Spam (wikipedia)? Let's say it was made out of soy beans, and processed to resemble the stuff in a can of Spam. Of course, they'd want to capitalize on the mark, so a name is very important. Think they'd call it 'Spoym' ?

Imagine the canonical TV ad for Spam, where dad stands up at the B-B-Q and yells 'MORE SPOYM!!!' Or walk into a Brooklyn deli and ask for a Spoym sandwich. I bet you'd get something completely different.