The Globe and Mail
Road Sage
Spotify’s Car Thing is a either a great branding play or just another thing to distract me while I’m driving
Published April 16, 2021
Courtesy of manufacturer
Keep it simple. It’s sound advice and savvy business. Why complicate matters when you can get your point across in a clear basic fashion? This must have been the thinking at Spotify, the audio streaming and media-services provider, when the company decided to name its voice-controlled podcast-assistant hardware “Car Thing.”
Announced in 2019, Spotify has just made Car Thing available to some users on an invite-only basis in the United States. The reductive bluntness of “Car Thing” is a far cry from the name “Spotify,” which, on the surface, has absolutely nothing to do with music, streaming or audio. If the company made stain-removing products, the name Spotify would make sense. Spotify is an enormous company, so it is important to remember that a lot of money and market testing went into the name Car Thing. At some meeting, someone must have said, “What about ‘VAC’ for ‘Voice Audio Assistant?’ To which the CEO may have replied, “No we’re going with Car Thing.”