Naming briefs #10

TRONQUE and PLONTS: Adventures in clonkiness.

Welcome back to Naming Briefs, where I scrutinize and analyze brand names I’ve spotted in the wild or in my reading. This report is the tenth in a series; here’s Naming Briefs #9 and here’s Naming Briefs #8, which has a link to previous installments. Drop a note in the comments if you’ve seen a name I should write about.

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Tronque.

The sound of a brand name isn’t the only thing that counts toward its success or failure, but it’s pretty darned important, especially when the brand is selling beauty. I’ve named beauty products myself and have written in the past about sound symbolism: “the phenomenon by which certain units of sound seem inherently associated with certain kinds of information.”¹ Some sounds communicate smoothness; others may suggest briskness or fullness or luminosity. (I’m speaking here, of course, of sounds in English, although some principles apply cross-culturally.)

What sort of message do we hear in “Tronque,” pronounced “tronk”? Not an aesthetically pleasing one, I’m sorry to say.

Tronque display at Saks Fifth Avenue San Francisco. The Q is pretty, the name not so much. Photo by me during my reconnaissance mission at by-appointment-only Saks.

Tronque, styled as TRONQUE in marketing copy, was founded by New Zealander Tanné Snowden after she underwent surgery for endometriosis, which left visible scars. She now sells “a concise edit of products formulated specifically for the skin on the body” because “skincare isn’t just for the face.” A stick of deodorant costs US$50; a 25ml bottle of “scar concentrate” will set you back $160.

Here’s how the website defines the name:

“TRONQUE is trunk [noun] — the core of your body.”

I don’t know which bilingual dictionary Ms. Snowden consulted, but tronque spelled that way doesn’t mean “trunk [noun]” in any language I checked. The French word for “trunk of the body” is spelled tronc — hold that thought! — while tronqué with an acute accent is an adjective meaning “truncated.”

French tronc can also mean the “box” sort of trunk, as in a piece of luggage or as in tronc des pauvres, a collection box for the needy. British English has adopted the latter sense of tronc to mean “an arrangement that exists to pool and share the proceeds of tips and gratuities, paid by customers, in a fair way to staff.”

To me, though, TRONQUE will always and forever evoke one of the worst stumbles in recent branding history: the renaming of the Chicago Tribune Publishing Company as tronc — yes, all lower case — in 2016. It was supposed to be a portmanteau² of Tribune Online Content, and it was roundly mocked, including by yours truly. (Poynter, the global journalism nonprofit, tweeted at the time that “tronc” had won out over “bramp, flirp, scormf, and ker-chonk.”) As I wrote in June 2016:

I am fairly confident that years of exposure will not make me fall in love, or even in like, with tronc. It’s a word that sounds silly at best, ugly at worst, a rhyming cousin of honk, zonk, bonk, and honky-tonk. 

I concluded: “There’s nothing but jonc in that tronc.”

The Chicago tronc lasted a mere eighteen months; the company is once again Tribune Publishing. And eight years after the tronc era, I still hate the sound of the name. I don’t like it any better when the spelling has been fake-Frenchified. What’s more, I don’t like the flatfooted (or flat-any-other-body-part-ed) descriptiveness of the name: It’s ointments for your trunk-skin, so let’s call it Trunk.

Will no one think of the elephants? OK, I will.

Tronque may be facing bigger challenges than its name, though. As Beauty Matter reported last month: “Given that the luxury bodycare brand Tronque made its debut at Bergdorf Goodman just this past June and has only been sold in Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue since 2022, founder Tanné Snowden is understandably extremely curious as to how the proposed acquisition of Neiman Marcus by Saks Fifth Avenue will play out.”

“Extremely curious” may be a euphemism for “shitting bricks.”

Plonts.

Plonts wordmark in yellow type with a “melting” O.

Subscriber Ginger Katz alerted me to this brand name last month, and just this week I was served the company’s launch ad, “The Hole-y Myth,” which stars comedian Kate Berlant. “The Hole-y Myth” is a red herring, so to speak: Plonts doesn’t make bagels or donuts, it makes plant-based cheese with a side of attitude. The ad is 60 seconds long, and we don’t hear the company’s until 30 seconds in, and then only twice more. A new brand should be relying a whole lot more on repetition, and a whole lot sooner.

The ad is, well, cheesy, which may be the point. But my point here is the Plonts name, which shares the /ON/ phoneme with Tronque. It also shares some unfortunate sound symbolism.

Why “Plonts”? Here you go:

See what I mean about attitude?

Plonts is based right here in Oakland, California, my fair city. I suspect the company’s founders are young people; I can’t think of another excuse for their confusing “puerile” for “effective consumer marketing.”

In her message to me, Ginger linked to an article in Eater by Jaya Saxena headlined “Something Must Be Done About the Names of Plant-Based Food Companies.” Here’s Jaya:

The idea of a plant-based cheddar that melts and shreds and tastes just like dairy cheddar sounds fantastic. But Plonts reminded me there’s a growing list of plant-based products that make me feel like I’m gargling leeches every time I say their names. There’s Malk, which I had been under the impression was the vitamin-lacking milk substitute from the Simpsons. Vrimp, a shrimp dupe from Nestle. Klimon, a line of almond-based desserts that is just “no milk” spelled backwards.

Gargling leeches! Yum.³

Is “Plonts” supposed to sound fancy and British? It just makes me think of plotz, which is Yiddish for “to split” or “to explode.” (“I laughed so hard I thought I’d plotz!”)

Is the O in Plonts meant to be a zero, as in “zero dairy”? That might make sense, but the company doesn’t bother to make the connection.

Finally, and this is one of those nitpicky trademark things that I remind my clients about: Don’t ever use your brand name in a generic sense. (Long story short: It leaves you vulnerable to trademark dilution.) Your product isn’t made from “plonts.” Your brand is Plonts. Your product is made from plants. Or so you say.

While I was brooding about how much I dislike the Plonts name, I remembered another company with a tricky name, and the slogan that saved it: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good!” (The problem with “Smucker’s” was yet another similar-sounding Yiddish word: schmuck.) I did a little Googling and found a delightful column in the Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal from 2015 that traced the origin of the slogan and listed a bunch of slogans that hadn’t made the cut, including “Smucker’s will make you pucker” and “If you find a better jelly, you buy it!” The winning tagline — the work of ad-agency copywriter Lois Wyse — helped transform a small regional company into an international brand. I wrote about Lois Wyse when she died in 2007.

Memo to Plonts: Find yourself the next Lois Wyse. You’re welcome.

1. I published that sound-symbolism story in 2019 and it’s received only 28 “claps” from readers. Claps = Medium bucks. Help a girl out, won’t you?

2. It was in fact a #shitmanteau.

3. I wrote about MALK and other plant-milk names in 2021. And I went deeper into the naming of milk and milk substitutes in a 2023 Medium story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Milk.”