What's in a name?

I’d really love to know how the marketing teams (is it the marketing department?) come up with names for truck lines.

The Nissan Silverado, the Dodge Durango, GMC Sierra -- I get this. Clearly their target market is the men who’ve spent too much time awake at 3 AM watching John Wayne duking it out with rapacious, marauding Comanches (and, naturally, the Indians were always the villains in the 1950s). These are the guys who really wanted to grow up to BE John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Kirk Douglas combined.

Marketing’s figuring the dudes who live in the Midwest, the South and Eastern Seaboard cities and small towns, wearing dusters and Stetsons are their suckers. And they are.


Here’s the truck name that I totally don’t get -- the Ford F 150. ‘the hell? This sounds more like a fighter jet designation than anything else. Is this for the the armchair warriors without the skills, talent, intelligence, desperate financial need and/or brass to actually enlist and learn how to fly those birds?


Then there are the bro trucks. The Urban Dictionery says it best: Bro trucks

A bro truck is basically any truck (SUV's included) with a ridiculously large lift kit and oversized rims. Ridiculously large being a lift that raises the truck so high that it renders the vehicle dangerous to actually offroad. Rear and side windows are plastered with common bro stickers (SRH, Skin, SoCal, KMK, Famous Stars and Straps, Skin) and so forth... Bro trucks have no real offroad qualities and are laughed at by people who actually offroad their trucks that have legit lifts.

 Here’s an example of doing it right. Clearly this is (go to the link already!) a for real work not ego truck. And it’s pink! One of the few times that I can honestly say that I like the color.

With apologies to Mr. Shakespeare:

What's in a name? that which we call a pick up truck
By any other name would be as sturdy and useful;
So Silverado would, were he not Silverado call'd,
Retain that rugged practicality which he owes
Without that title. Silverado, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.