I came across this article on the MSN Money webpage and thought it worth sharing.
Think naming a baby is tough? Try naming a cookie. Or a company.
Picking a brand name is an art form. The name must be memorable and “sticky.” It has to be easy to pick up and hard to put down. And you might have to live with your choice a long time, because a successful name will make its place in history.
Several companies have done it right. “Google” became an iconic brand name of the 21st century. Old-timers hit the jackpot when they came up with “Oreo,” “Slinky” and “Coca-Cola.”
Where did these names come from? As it turns out, each name on this list has an interesting story of creativity, resourcefulness and just plain luck.
Slinky
While working at a shipbuilding company in 1943, engineer Richard James noticed that some tension springs had a funny way of moving around on the floor. He told his wife, Betty, about it, and the pair started turning the springs into toys.
Betty James came up with the name “Slinky” while looking through a dictionary in 1944, according to her obituary in The New York Times. She picked “slinky” because she thought it was the best name for “sinuous and graceful movement and the soft sound of the expanding and contracting coil,” wrote Dennis Hevesi.
James and her husband introduced the Slinky at the Gimbels Department Store in Philadelphia in 1945. The toy was an instant hit, and the couple sold 400 in 90 minutes at $1 each, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Coca-Cola
The most successful soft drink in history was named after the coca leaf and the kola nut — two of its ingredients, according to the book “Secret Formula” by Frederick Allen.
Pharmacist John Pemberton is credited with concocting the first batch of Coca-Cola syrup in 1886. The name for the syrup came from Frank Mason Robinson, Pemberton’s business partner, Allen wrote. Robinson replaced the “k” in kola with a “c,” thinking that the two “c” letters would look better together, and wrote it out in the flowing script that would later become Coca-Cola’s famous logo. (The soft drink also once contained trace amounts of cocaine, but it has been cocaine-free since 1929.)
Coca-Cola was not an instant hit. In the first year, sales averaged only nine drinks a day, according to historical information from Coca-Cola (KO).
Pemberton sold off the Coca-Cola business beginning in 1888, never realizing the enormous potential of his creation.
Oreo
No one knows exactly where the name “Oreo” came from. It’s believed to stem from the Greek word for mountain, or perhaps the French or Spanish word for gold.
Nabisco, now a unit of Kraft Foods (KFT), registered the Oreo cookie as a trademark in 1913. It was originally called the Oreo biscuit, but the company changed the name to Oreo sandwich in 1921. Its name changed again in 1948 to Oreo cream sandwich and in 1975 to Oreo chocolate sandwich cookie.
The search giant got its name from the word “googol,” a huge number best described as the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.
There are different stories about how Google (GOOG) sprung from “googol,” but the definitive account was published by Stanford University computer scientist David Koller.
Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first called their search engine “BackRub,” and Page was chatting with office mates about a new name in 1997. One of Page’s colleagues suggested “googolplex,” and Page shortened it to “googol,” Koller writes. His colleague searched to see if the Web domain for the name was available, but he misspelled it as “Google.” The name stuck, and Page registered “google.com” within hours.
Arm & Hammer
The baking soda company Church & Dwight (CHD) started in 1846 after its founders figured out how to extract sodium bicarbonate from mineral deposits, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
But the company didn’t come up with the name “Arm & Hammer” until 21 years later. James Church, the son of one of the founders, owned a spice company that sold “Arm & Hammer” spices with a logo featuring the arm of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking. Vulcan’s arm was holding — surprise — a hammer.
James Church folded the spice company in 1867 and joined the baking soda business, bringing the name “Arm & Hammer” with him.
Nike
Sporting goods company Nike (NKE) is named after the Greek goddess of victory, often depicted with wings.
The company was founded in 1964 with the lackluster name Blue Ribbon Sports. It would be years before co-founder Phil Knight began casting about for a new name.
One of the company’s earliest employees, Jeff Johnson, said the image of Nike came to him during a dream, according to the book “Just Do It.”
Johnson argued for the name, saying that some of the best American brand names only had one or two syllables and a letter that wasn’t used very often. The name Nike won over the team, and it was much better than the name Knight came up with: “Dimension Six.”
Starbucks
“Let’s stop by Cargo House for a latte.” Just doesn’t have the same ring as Starbucks (SBUX), does it? But “Cargo House” was almost the name chosen for the now-ubiquitous coffee chain, according to a Seattle Times interview with Gordon Bowker, one of the company’s founders.
One of Bowker’s advertising partners said that words that began with “st” were powerful, Bowker told the newspaper. So he made a list of “st” words. Soon the team was discussing an old Washington mining town called Starbo. Bowker said he immediately thought of first mate Starbuck in the novel “Moby-Dick.” And Starbucks was born.
“Moby-Dick didn’t have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense,” Bowker told the newspaper.
The social networking company’s original name was “Stat.us,” according to a Los Angeles Times interview with co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey said the team wanted a name that captured the sense of buzzing all over the world. They came up with the name “twitch,” but Dorsey said that word didn’t bring up the right imagery. They found “twitter” in the dictionary and thought it was perfect.
“The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds,'” Dorsey said. “And that’s exactly what the product was.”
Five Guys
The popular burger chain started in 1986, when Jerry and Janie Murrell told their sons to either start a business or go to college. Books or burgers — and the sons chose burgers. So the family opened the first location in Arlington, Va., with money originally saved for the sons’ college tuition. Within five years, the company would open four more around the Washington, D.C., area.
The five “guys” in the company’s name started as Jerry Murrell and his four sons: Matt, Jim, Chad and Ben. But when his son Tyler was born, Jerry dropped out and the five guys became the five sons.
Now, there are more than 1,000 locations in the United States, with 1,500 more in development, the company says
Doritos
Frito-Lay translates the name from Spanish as “little bits of gold.”
Arch West, the Frito-Lay executive who created the chip, got the idea while on vacation in 1964. He bought a bag of toasted tortilla chips at a Southern California roadside shack, reported The Washington Post. He came back to work and pitched a crispy corn chip with a Spanish-sounding name.
One of the first television commercials for Doritos described them as a “swinging, Latin sort of snack,” the Post reported.
Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos initially called his online-retail company Cadabra (as in abracadabra). That sounded good until he called his lawyer to announce the name.
“Cadaver! Why would you want to call your company that?” the lawyer asked, according to Entrepreneur magazine. It didn’t take long for Bezos to realize a new name was in order.
Bezos settled on Amazon for two reasons, Mashable reported. One was to suggest how large the company could become. Another was so that Amazon would land near the top of website rankings, which at the time were often alphabetical.
Domino’s
In 1960, Tom Monaghan and his brother bought a pizza restaurant in Ypsilanti, Mich., called DomiNick’s. The business took off, and Monaghan bought two more locations, he told Fortune in 2003.
The restaurant’s original owner, whose first name was Dominick, didn’t like his name being used on the expanding empire, so Monaghan had to change the name.
“One day an employee came back from delivering a pizza and said, ‘I’ve got our name! Domino’s!'” Monaghan told Fortune.
Monaghan loved the idea, and began using a domino logo with three dots — one for each Domino’s (DPZ) outlet. Every time he added a new store, he added a dot. “You can see I wasn’t thinking of a national chain back then.”
Earlier this month, the company said it would overhaul its operations, getting a new logo and dropping the word “Pizza” from its name.
