Branding is a good way of making complex or unfamiliar items accessible to people. Why this matters came home to me recently while reading C.J Sansom’s marvellous historical crime novel ‘Dark Fire’
It’s 1540, and the lawyer Matthew Shardlake is at a Tudor banquet in the city of London where he is offered one of those ‘edible, yellow things from the New World that have been raising eyebrows since they arrived last month’ The phallic, ’sweetest fruit of the New World’ provokes shocked interest amongst his fellow diners. His first bite is actually not very pleasant but when he sees people peeling back skins, he tries a second bite, but remains pretty unconvinced.
What this vignette shows is that defining what things are is lot harder than describing what things are like.
Moving to more modern times, does your computer actually crash? Does it really have a virus? Why is a mouse called a mouse? All of these examples ofcontemporary technology show that humans respond well to analogical reference points and that postioning without a good frame of reference is doomed to failure 
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