If in New York City today, you might want to head over to Columbus Circle at 5:00 PM for your free gift:

Staying safe in New York City just got even sexier. The Health Department today unveiled a brand new look for the NYC Condom and launched a cutting-edge media campaign to encourage New Yorkers to “get some.” …street teams will meet commuters at busy crossroads around the city – including Union Square in Manhattan, the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn, and 149th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx – to hand out the new NYC Condom for Valentine’s Day.

New York City’s branded condom just got a package redesign, and a series of new public service announcements.

Read more and get some here.

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Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, the visionary who with her first husband extended the Winnie The Pooh characters and brand into a merchandising machine, passed away yesterday.

After licensing the merchandise rights to The Walt Disney Company in 1961 in exchange for royalties, Pooh products grew to generate over $1 billion in annual sales.

An interesting life, as captured in this remembrance from the Los Angeles Times:

Her first husband, Stephen Slesinger, was among the first to see Pooh’s financial potential. A literary agent, Slesinger in 1930 secured the rights to sell Pooh merchandise in the United States and Canada from A.A. Milne, author of the Pooh books.

When Slesinger died in 1953, Lasswell was left with the rights and a 1-year-old daughter to support.

“I thought, ‘Now what do I do?’ But it was right there for me,” Lasswell told The Times in 2002. “I decided to promote Pooh.”

…[She] paid homage to the character that’s “really been my whole life,” Lasswell told Fortune magazine in 2003, by driving a Cadillac with a license plate that said “POOH 1.”

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We recently discussed the topics of resurrected dormant brands, otherwise labeled Zombie Brands, and their value due to latent brand equity.

A follow-up story appears at the online magazine Slate, speaking to revived brands such as the Indian Motorcycle, the McDonald’s McRib sandwich, Polaroid recast as a flat panel TV brand, and the MG motor car.

Read more about similar dormant brands here.

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Developing a brand name for a company or product with a global footprint is both an art, and a science, as discussed in this story from the New York Times via our friends at Wordlab.

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From the U.K.’s The Independent:

“Brand promise is created by a name, especially where fragrance is concerned,” says James Craven of Les Senteurs, a specialist perfumery in Belgravia. “Scent itself is ethereal and almost subliminal, so good names are powerfully suggestive; do they conjure up an image or suggest emotional implications or attributes?”

For Craven, the best perfume names summon up a “story” to back up the scent; Guerlain’s Shalimar, for instance, with more than a hint of the Orient. Its name means “temple of love” in Sanskrit, and it was inspired by the Indian emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Shalimar garden in Lahore as a tribute to his wife (and went on to build the Taj Mahal as further homage after her death). Or the same company’s L’Heure Bleu, which, according to Craven, calls to mind “twilight, the reflective hour, when you meditate on transience and lost love.”

We agree. Any great brand name offers a great story, mining the stories, myths, and imagery we each learn at a young age.

Today’s perfume names often dispense with such poetic niceties and settle for “globally appropriate” haikus. These can be po-faced - Truth, Eternity, Angel - or vaguely transgressive - Opium, Addict, Higher, Crave. “Will we soon have Junkie by Cacharel or OD by Dior?” wonders Craven. “Names are chosen more by global branding marketers these days than by the perfumers themselves, which is why they’re becoming ‘edgier’ and, paradoxically, duller.”

But companies ignore “globally appropriate” names at their peril. Givenchy’s latest launch, a perfume named Ange ou Démon, is meant to invoke “the two sides of woman; the angel and the devil that lurk within”, to British ears, it sounds more like a chav-tastic couple named Ange and Damon.

Despite other shortcomings, Auge ou Démon is a two-sided, positive and negative name the Law of Negativity loves. As for another fragrance product name satisfying this theory, one of our laws of branding, the story continues:

Image-obsessed celebrities are usually too canny to fall into these traps when launching their own perfumes; Liz Taylor’s White Diamonds suggested opulence, while Britney Spears’s Curious certainly reflects her parenting techniques. But, while Alan Cumming’s image may be that of an omnisexual Puck, his Cumming: The Fragrance is perhaps a little too upfront. “It certainly conjures up an image,” says Craven, with some distaste, “but a rather unsavoury one.”

Learn more about Alan Cumming’s new business venture, by watching the commercial here.

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