The small car company made a smart move to name their car ‘smart’ in the first place. Everybody ‘knows’ that small cars are mainly produced for people who can’t parallel park. That’s why I was so confused to hear about their new electric car’s name.

ED – A (not so) brilliant campaign

Yes, they called the car ‘ED’. It brings us back to faults like the MR2, in French pronounced as ‘mèrde’, or the Nova which in Spanish countries is know as ‘No vas’ (No go). For those who don’t know what the fuzz is about, while within Smart ED stands for ‘Electric Drive’, in the USA it E.D. stands for ‘Erectile Dysfunction’. It is the result of a brilliant nationwide campaign by the producers of Viagra to make the problem something one could talk about and preferably a problem people could do something about. In former days people referred mainly to Erectile Dysfuntions as ‘impotency’, which is also a synonym for people who just can’t perform overall. Impotency is not something you can do something about, so the people that wanted to bring Viagra to the market first needed to reframe the problem so that people could talk about it as it where a normal thing. So they launched a campaign with many celebrities ‘coming out’, claiming to be an ED. The campaign worked.

The thing is, that Smart would have been better of if I had talked about their lithium ion battery pack that may or may not be supplied by Tesla Motors. I could have said that their former model used a sodium battery and that the new pack will make it able to achieve a range of up to 240 km which is perfect for the city commuter.

But I won’t! I’ll just be talking about their stupid name and the poor international branding due diligence job they did (if any).





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