Irn-Bru

This is how you market a tiny ginger Scottish drink

Irn Bru is the world’s most popular soft drink (that isn’t Coca-Cola). Irn Bru showed its true-blue Scottishness by tweeting a cheeky graphic of the global dominance of Coca-Cola. Scotland is the blue bit – favouring home-grown fizzy ginger Irn-Bru. One (very Scottish) explanation is that : Irn-bru uses a colouring called ‘sunset yellow’ that is […]

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weird company names in China

Banned : long winded, weird company names in China

Weird company names are banned by the Chinese State Administration for Industry and Commerce. The 33 new guidelines include a section outlawing overly long-winded names. No longer will company names consist of sentences, paragraphs, or even short novellas. Sounds over the top? Maybe you’re not familiar with the northern Chinese condom company ‘Uncle Niu’. Deep breath. […]

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bra size discount Chinese Restaurant

Ick or slick marketing? Chinese restaurant offers bra size discounts

A Chinese restaurant has gotten in trouble for offering discounts based on bra size. The Qianjiang Evening Post reports local complaints about the above poster for the Trendy Shrimp restaurant. One complaint said it was “vulgar advertising” and “discriminatory towards women”. The posters have already been removed. Trendy Shrimp general manager Lan Shenggang tells it straight […]

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craft beer named by AI

An AI beats humans at naming craft beer

A neural network system has learned to name craft beer from a huge dataset extracted from BeerAdvocate.com.   Credit: Lewis and Quark   Researcher and electrical engineer Janelle Shane has already trained AI to name kittens, metal bands, Pokemon, paint colors, and more. The AI-generated craft beer names vary from likely, to weirdly impressive, to bet-level […]

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