Yeah, I learned this one watching Soylent, the meal-replacement drink: everyone was talking about it, saying how awful the name was. It clearly wasn't a bad name, though, because it made everyone talk about it, and nobody actually mistook the real product for the fictional namesake.
People make decisions at the margin. What you'll actually get is that a lot of people will become a small percentage less likely to buy it. Some of those people will be driven over the edge, since they were just barely going to buy it and now just barely weren't. But none of those people, when asked, will tell you "the stupid name was why we didn't buy it". At best they'll point to a lot of reasons of which the name is only one. At worst, they'll just point to a general sense of distrust that is 5% caused by the stupid name, and not even be able to analyze their own motivations well enough to answer the question.
In other words, "would you not buy/not vote because of this problem" is a bad method of analysis, and will tell you that it had no effect when it actually did.
Next to the wild success of the viral marketing campaign that sliver of people is completely insignificant. I'm sure the name did push a few people over the edge, but it pushed everyone to spread the word. Sure, you could postulate the existence of an alternative brand that was equally viral without the negative connotations -- but that would be nothing more than wishful thinking.
We had an "innovative" name, so we got loads of "You should change your name to X" and "You're not getting elected because you're named Z not Y".
Lots of my team was really worried about it. But I always told them to ask these people if that's the reason why they are not voting for us.
There were only two answers:
(1) "Nah, I'm still voting for you, but OTHER people MIGHT not."
and
(2) "Nah, i would not vote for you even if you were named X or Y"
It really taught me to stop assuming things.