Self-Promotion - Logo Resemblance Survey

Having spoken to John earlier I have some concerns about the symbol for my self-promotion, he brought to my attention the following things:

• The way the balls are hanging would stop them from working
• At a small size the lines the balls hang from may become invisible or look like a printing defect because of how thin they'd be
• The balls are quite large in comparison to the text

Before printing my business cards out I wanted to test out if the symbol actually resembled a Newton's Cradle - this is something I found necessary after the feedback from the DBA people was that the logo we initially proposed wouldn't mean anything to it's audience.

Question

I messaged 10 friends from home who don't study anything in relation to graphic design or physics, and who don't know anything about my work, and asked them what they thought the below image looked like. I removed the text so as not to give a hint that it was to do with my self-promotion.

Answers

There responses were as follows:

Person 1 - "My first immediate thought was a Newton's cradle"
Person 2 - "Newton's Cradle"
Person 3 - "A f**ked-up newtons cradle"
Person 4 - "one of those things where you swing a ball and it hits the others and then it keeps going i dont know what theyre called"
Person 5 - "Balls dangling on strings"
Person 6 - "Newton's cradle or snooker table with lines"
Person 7 - "A newton's cradle"
Person 8 - "Where the strings enter an acoustic guitar"
Person 9 - "It looked like someone f**ked up a Newton's Cradle" 
Person 10 - "Black balls, an arrow, Nibbler from Futurama's poop"

I then asked the ones who didn't say a Newton's Cradle if it looked like one, their answers were as follows:

Person 5 - "Oh yeah"
Person 8 - "Yep it does, I think it's just the fact I play guitar that made me say that"
Person 10 - "Yeah, just a wonky one"

Conclusions

7/10 People immediately recognised it as a Newton's cradle which is good, and of the three that didn't, 2 sounded convinced when I question them if it looked like one.

People 3 and 9 both described it as "f**ked up", and person 10 called it "wonky", which doesn't really represent reliability and functionality as I'd hoped it did. It's clear that I need to work further on it with emphasis on depicting it in a way that it would actually work, as the need for it to show the letter M is secondary to this.