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When you want to refer to a well-known brand name, but the legal department is advising you to avoid using trademarks in your show, you can just change a few letters around to thinly disguise the brand name. This is widespread practice in anime.
A subtrope of Brand X. Compare Parody Names.
Examples:
Anime
- In Excel Saga, Nabeshin drives a "Mitsubibi Lancer." They also watch news reports on a SQNY television, which is just lazy.
- Death Note has "Gentle!" instead of Google, Eighteen instead of Seventeen magazine, and "Fanasonic" instead of Panasonic giant TVs.
- And to the amusement of this editor: "Mild Turkey".
- Done (a lot) in Eureka Seven, with, among others, "Rersi Cola" (which also sounds like "RC Cola", for a double whammy) and "Smickers" bars.
- Cowboy Bebop featured "Pippu" cola, whose colour scheme was exactly the same as that of Pepsi.
- Planetes has "Bepsi," and there's also a Coca-Cola analogue.
- Lucky Star has "Rindows
 ◊" (who knows, maybe its an Engrish version of Lindows...)
- Prince Of Tennis had "Ponta" as a stand-in for Fanta.
- Welcome To The NHK also has "Mindows" OS, a "Pujitsu" computer and a "Lurex" (or something like that) wristwatch, "Warboro"-brand cigarettes, and probably other such brands.
- "Espon" laptops appear in the Haruhi Suzumiya anime, and the characters regularly eat at 'WcDonalds'.
- The latter seems somewhat odd since during one outdoor scene, the background shows what is unmistakably a Sunkus convenience store...
- A "Nihon" camera appears in the first episode of Negima!?.
- In the manga,characters could be found drinking coffee at "Starbooks".
- As well as one character wearing a "Sax Pascals Anarchy" hat in chapter 27.
- Nihon also supplies cameras for Azumanga Daioh, in the anime. There's also a Fuji-like sign (when Sakaki buys her Nihon camera), but no text is visible.
- Similarly, products from "Somy" (and their "Pandycam"), "Mikon" and other similar "manufacturers" can be found in many anime.
- Ouran High School Host Club does this often, with 'Mational' light bulbs (National), 'PineApple' computers, 'Hescafe' coffee, 'Oh!Laan! Auctions (a parody of Yahoo! Auctions), and 'Ukidoki Memorial' (Tokimeki Memorial).
- "Puchy" instead of "Pocky" in The iDOLM@STER Xenoglossia.
- "Pochy" takes the place of "Pocky" in Onegai Teacher. The sequel, Onegai Twins, features a character who eats "Prech", a parody of "Pretz."
- The first season of Initial D, where the word "Trueno" (in the front of the protagonist's car) is spelled as "Toreno". This eventually changed when Toyota allowed them to use the AE 86 Sprinter Trueno's proper name.
- In one episode of Ranma 1/2, Genma uses a "Seny Gandycam" to record Ranma and Akane's Almost Kiss.
- Noein has a "Yonkie" (Yorkie) bar.
- Black Lagoon has multiple, the most noticeable of which would be the "Heireken" (Heineken) beer the protagonists all drink.
- WcDonalds or a variant thereof often appears in anime (and a few western shows) with the McDonalds' golden arches flipped vertically.
- Sanzo's 'Merlboro' cigarettes in the Saiyuki Reload -burial- OVA. They're always regular Marlboros in the manga.
- Not apparent when Nobuyuki films his family with a Pioneer camcorder in the Tenchi TV storyline, including the movie. Not a true subversion, since Pioneer is also the presenter of the series.
- An episode of Gundam Wing briefly features a circuit board labelled "Intel Outside"
- "Somy" in Ah My Goddess, among uncounted others.
- Azumanga Daioh also has "abidas" (adidas) and "Rocky" (Pocky).
- A character in Nabari No Ou uses software like Odobe Photograph, Mouton Anti Virus 2015, Saikrosoft Sentence/EXL/Autolock/Postman, and Ninja Seiden (a pun on Ninja Gaiden).
- Neon Genesis Evangelion has "Yebichu" (Yebisu) beer, carried from the Oruchuban Ebichu manga; the Rebuild of Evangelion OVA, however, did had the real Yebisu.
- In Project A Ko, we briefly see a can of "Doctor Bepper."
- The first episode of Shakugan no Shana shows the protagonist entering a music and dvd store named HNV with an all but identical HMV sign overhead.
- Echizen drinks Ponta in The Prince Of Tennis.
Video Games
- In the much-loved 'A New Life' stage of Hitman: Blood Money, one of the best ways to get started is to slip a pair of drugged donuts to some FBI agents, so you can steal their uniforms. The fauxnuts are, of course, from 'Delicious Donuts', using the characteristic color scheme and font of Dunkin' Donuts.
- Command And Conquer: Red Alert 2 had "McBurger Kong" restaurants.
- The vending machines in Persona 3 all have Captain Ersatz brands of beverages, such as Cielo Mist, SoBay, Mad Bull, One-Up, and this editor's favorite, Fountain Dew.
- Just about every car model in the Grand Theft Auto series is a Bland Name Product version of an existing car. Examples off the top of my head include the Mundano (Ford Mondeo), Impaler (Chevrolet Impala), Bug (VW Beetle), Phoenix (Pontiac Firebird), Infernus (Lamborghini Diablo in GTA III, although San Andreas replaced it with a Honda NSX) and U-Jerk truck.
- This trope goes all the way back to GameTek's MS-DOS and Commodore 64 adaptations of The Price Is Right, released in 1990.
- The Japanese version of Mario Kart 64 features sponsors such as Marioro, Luigip and Yoshil.
- The remake of the first Trauma Center has Pochy. No points for getting the reference right.
- In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Snake's favourite brand of cigarettes is Lucky Strikers, in a white box with a red spot. Very lazy.
- In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud is forced to hijack a motorcycle in order to escape from Shinra HQ. It's a Hardy Daytona.
Live Action TV
- "Morley", a fictional cigarette brand based on Marlboro cigarettes ("Marleys"), was the brand of choice for The Cigarette Smoking Man (of The X Files) and Spike (of Buffy The Vampire Slayer). Packs of Morleys have also turned up in Malcolm In The Middle, The Outer Limits, and the movies Spy Game, Prozac Nation and thirteen.
- A number of episodes of the TV series Friends feature "Love That Crunch" cereal, which is otherwise completely the same as "Captain Crunch", including the character on the front.
- Played with on an episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, where witches trying to magically create brand goods automatically create a Bland Name Product equivalent with an obviously similar name, such as "N&N's" instead of "M&M's".
- They couldn't even have Rollerblade inline skates, instead, they got Roller Blahds.
- An episode of Homicide Life On The Street has a character drinking "Bedwiser".
- Skist, the soft drink choice of Veronica Mars.
- In the Hobgoblins episode of MST3k, an educational short Crow has made is shown on a "Stony" TV.
- In Big Bad Beetleborgs, a bottle of "Fountain Don't" is used to trick one of the main characters to drink a mutation potion.
- Every single Nickelodeon show. Extremely narmful in Teenick show iCarly, where their webshow is called 'iCarly', but they still listen to 'pearpods', talk on their 'pearphones', and all the computers have a pear logo on them.
Western Animation
- In The Simpsons, Homer Simpson knows that he can trust the "Sorny," "Panaphonics," and "Magnetbox" brand TVs that you find in an outlet store. Then again, he's an idiot. There's also has "Where's Waldo" and "Cosmic Wars".
- A number of scenes in King Of The Hill take place in Luly's Cafeteria. The restaurant and its logo are a blatant pastiche of Luby's, but odds are that viewers who haven't been to Texas have probably never heard of it.
Film
- The movie Coming to America lampshades it, as the owner of the fast-food restaurant McDowell's gripes about McDonald's trying to sue him over (what he feels are) trivial similarities.
Cleo McDowell: Look... me and the McDonald's people got this little misunderstanding. See, they're McDonald's... I'm McDowell's. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.
- In Idiocracy, Brawndo is largely a stand-in for Gatorade. The main character, who's from the present day, even mentions that it "tastes just like Gatorade".
- Repo Man has packages marked 'beer' and 'food'.
Literature
- In About the B'nai Bagels, protagonist Mark keeps a copy of Playboy-like magazine under his mattress called Playgirl. Another boy's mother actually gets him a subscription. Later editions changed it to Playboy.
- A very interesting choice, since Playgirl magazine really exists, and having a copy under one's bed would say something rather interesting about the character.
Comic Books
- In Ultimate Spider-Man, the search engine used by Peter Parker is called Goggle.
- The Goggle! It does nothing!
Literature
- Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon features the protagonists using an UNIX-like operating system developed in Finland, called... "Finux" (instead of "Linux").
Real Life
- Manufacturers of some counterfeit products make small changes to names, logos, and other trademarks. Some examples can be found on Engadget's Keepin' it real fake series. An example seen by this editor would be a "Game Bay" cartridge made by "Nintende(TN)".
- This editor once saw clothing by "NIKF" and "adidGs" being sold at a market.
- And this (other) troper has seen batteries branded "Durasell" and "SQMY" at flea markets.
- From The Fifties through The Seventies, it was common for cars to have names spelled out in separate chromed diecast letters along the hood, trunklid or fenders, bolted or riveted in place. Urban legend had it that these would sometimes be misspelled by the factory workers. Documented evidence does exist of one division's nameplate being placed on one part of the car and a different one on another (eg. "Buick" on the grille and "Oldsmobile" on the trunk lid). - Most common of all was their later falling off, leaving the driver with a Fo_d, C_evrolet or even a Do_g_ .
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