
How The Brands Got Their Names
Marilyn Thipthorpe
Ever wondered how the great brands like Apple and Samsung got their names; Was it just a fluke or did they really sit at a round table and work through it?
Apple
The story goes that Steve Jobs really liked apples and had just come back from a visit to an apple farm. He liked the idea so much that he put it forward and it was accepted on the merit that it would put their name (alphabetically) before Atari in the phonebook. So in complaisance with the idea, ‘computers ’was dropped from the brands name and ‘apple’ took its place
Samsung
In Korean ‘Samsung’ mean 3 stars. In fact until 1993, the Samsung logo featured 3 stars until the idea was ditched for its new blue and white badge.
LG
Lucky Goldstar or better known as LG did not always have it short snappy name. It was once called Goldstar until it merged with Lak-Hui- which is pronounced as Lucky…so there yopu have it Lucky Golstar or as its better known LG.
Facebook
FB was not FB back in 1994, when it was founded by Mark Zukerberg and his Harvard buddies.
Back then it was called Facemash and was intended as a rating game “hot or not’ in which students ranked their peers. The later version was known as ‘thefacebook.com’, it was limited to universities till 2005 when the ‘the’ was dropped.
Sony
Sony was once known as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation), it was renamed Sony partly due t the fact the Sony=Sound in Latin and partly for the term ‘sonny boy’ which in colloquial American meant something hip and trending. The name was completely made legal in 1958.
Microsoft
This was a simple transition made by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who created a portmanteau of ‘microprocessor’ and software’ which was then abbreviated to micro-soft.
Google
The word Google came about as a fluke when founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page came upon a misspelling ‘googol’ which is actually a mathematical term for a 1 followed by hundred zero’s. Google was originally known as Backrub!
