Go back, baaack to the late '80's, early '90's when most of us bough our first bikes.
There was GT with its triple triangle
Cannondale with those hoooge toobs dude
Kona with their sloping top tube
Orange with their loud paint and wishbone rear end
Marin with... with.... oh, no just a flouro paint job.
You've got to remember when brands were imprinting on our youthful minds, bikes that made an immediate impression remained in our brains. It was nothing to do with how it rode unless we were racing (which alot of us never did) it was how it looked.
I remember Marin quite well but I would never be able to tell the difference between the models apart from the groupset.
I was was floating around on a Grellow Claud Butler with 531 tubing - it was never cool until I took the CB decals off and stuck a pair of MAG 20 on it (which nobody else had at the time) - I was then uber cooool....