Naming is becoming an increasingly important part of brand promotion policy on a daily basis . Sometimes, in order to come up with a name for a company, brand or trademark, a large team of professionals is assembled, multiple brainstorming sessions , focus group surveys, marketing research are conducted, and all for the sake of generating a unique name for the brand.
Few people know that a large number of names of world famous brands were invented by students or based on musical passions, wordplay, typos, and puzzling acronyms. But despite this, the brand names have become entrenched in the minds of millions of people around the world and have made the companies popular and successful.
The most famous examples of global brand naming stories:
The world-famous search engine got this name quite by accident. The search engine was originally named BackRab, a little later in 1997 its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to change the name of the search engine. The brainstorming session took place in a Stanford dormitory among students who were trying to come up with a name for a system capable of processing colossal amounts of information. Then Larry Page got the idea to name the system “googol” – a number with 100 zeros, among students it simply meant “unimaginably many”. The student typing the name made a mistake when registering domain names, which is how “google.com” came to be.
The first project of the creator of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg, was a hooligan site that posted photos and data of students stolen from Harvard University’s website to be rated by visitors, and the name of the site was Facemash. Zuckerberg was expelled for this act, but he created a new project. The name came to him quite by accident, after he came across a book that was presented to all the graduates of the school from which Zuckerberg graduated – “The Photo Address Book”, which the students called simply “The Facebook” – a photo album.
VKontakte
Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, while looking for a name for his project, listened to Echo of Moscow radio in the background, where the phrase: “In full contact with information” was often repeated. By removing unnecessary words, Durov got the name of the most famous social network.
Apple
Apple is the favorite fruit of Steve Jobs (the founder of the company). After three months of futile attempts to come up with a company name, Steve Jobs threatened his partners that if they didn’t come up with a better name by five o’clock, he would call the company “Apple” – “Apple.”
HP(Hewlett-Packard)
This name was derived from the names of the company’s founders. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard flipped a coin to choose whose name would appear first in the title. Bill Hewlett won!
Kodak
The favorite letter of the company’s founder, George Eastman, was the letter K. He spent a long time looking for words that began and ended with that letter. After much searching, he settled on the word “Kodak,” as he thought that was the sound a camera made when taking a picture.
Xerox
The fact is that until the company was founded, there was only wet copy technology in the world. This is why inventor Chestor Carlson was so keen to emphasize the use of dry dye powder in copying technology. Based on this, it was decided to use the word “Xer” – from the Greek for “dry” – in the name.
Coca-cola
The most popular soft drink got this name due to the fact that the original recipe for the drink looked like this: three parts coca leaves to one part tropical cola tree nuts.
Pepsi
The drink was first made by pharmacist Caleb Bradham, who derived the name Pepsi from the word pepsin, the name of a digestive enzyme that helps break down proteins.
Sony
The founders of the company really wanted to choose a short and concise name, then they came across the Latin word sonus – “sound”. At that time (1950), the American word sonny, consonant with the word sonus, was widely used in Japan. However, the word sonny spelled in hieroglyphics read “unprofitable”, then the founders solved the problem by dropping one letter n from the name.
IKEA
Ingvar Kamprad is the founder of the company, Imtaryd is the native village where Ingvar Kamprad was born and started his business.
KOLORO company offers professional naming and trademark registration .
