marketing goes wild

"Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper". That's a lot of adjectives. The coworker who was holding it wondered if it comes in caffeine-free. (He also made the most spectacular face when he tasted it.)

Doesn't Dr. Pepper already have some cherry flavoring by definition? That's what made it different from Coke originally, right? (Which raises the question of the difference between Dr. Pepper and Cherry Coke. I rarely drink either, so I can't speak to that.)

a small bit of company culture

The company I work for just got bought. As part of this, we have to change our name -- but there's some flexibility in what that new name will be. People have been making lots of suggestions via our Wiki, but a Wiki is not a good way to track popularity of individual suggestions.

We're a data visualization and collaboration company. We have tools for solving this. :-)

One wall of our kitchen is now covered in stickie notes. Each note contains a proposed name and two vote tallies, one for and one against. People can add new stickies and vote on existing ones at any time. (One vote per stickie, vote on as many as you want, honor system.) The position of the stickie on the wall is governed by the two vote counts -- positive votes on one axis, negative votes on the other. Yeah, we could have done this through software, but this is more fun -- and much more interactive.

This is one of those odd bits of company culture that it's important to preserve. I've worked for places where the answer -- if people got input at all -- would have been to email your top three choices to so-and-so, who will tally them and publish a list. But that does not capture nearly enough information about the data.

Besides, that sort of process would also filter out the wacky suggestions early on. I think it's fun to see the wacky ones alongside the serious ones. Who knows -- a wacky one that catches on might be able to be tweaked to be workable anyway.