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Brands & Advertising
Logos, Slogans & Persuasion
What a brand is made of, and why the techniques work.
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The slogan "Just Do It" belongs to which company?
Where Brand Names Come From
Some brand names are acronyms, some are jokes, and several mean nothing at all in any language. That is often deliberate.
About this topic
A good brand name has to be pronounceable, memorable and legally defensible, and the third requirement pushes hard against the first two. Descriptive names are weak trademarks because nobody can monopolise ordinary words, so the strongest names tend to be invented outright. George Eastman said as much when he made up Kodak: short, distinctive, hard to misspell, and belonging to nobody else. The rest fall into a few recognisable patterns. Founders' names and initials account for a great many, sometimes buried past recognition. Classical borrowings supply a goddess here and a Latin root there. And a smaller category is pure suggestion — a name chosen to imply a country, a size or a heritage that the company does not actually have. Several of the answers below sit in that last group, and the invented backstories attached to them afterwards are often more famous than the real ones.
Questions & answers
Where Brand Names Come From: all 10 questions and answers
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
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1The name Adidas comes from what?
- A An abbreviation of "All Day I Dream About Sport"
- B A Greek word meaning swiftness
- C The town where the first factory stood
- D The founder's name, Adolf "Adi" Dassler Correct
Answer: D. The founder's name, Adolf "Adi" Dassler
Why: The phrase about dreaming of sport was invented decades later and fitted to the letters. His brother Rudolf founded Puma after the two fell out and split the family firm.
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2Lego is a contraction of a Danish phrase meaning what?
- A Small blocks
- B Good hands
- C Play well Correct
- D Build high
Answer: C. Play well
Why: It shortens "leg godt". The company was making wooden toys from 1932 and only moved to interlocking plastic bricks after the Second World War.
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3The name IKEA is made up of what?
- A A phrase meaning "a home for everyone"
- B The founder's initials plus his farm and his village Correct
- C A Swedish word for furniture
- D The surnames of two founding brothers
Answer: B. The founder's initials plus his farm and his village
Why: Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd. He registered the business in 1943, at the age of seventeen, initially selling pens and picture frames by mail.
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4Sony took its name partly from which Latin word?
- A Sonus, meaning sound Correct
- B Somnus, meaning sleep
- C Sanus, meaning healthy
- D Solus, meaning alone
Answer: A. Sonus, meaning sound
Why: It was combined with "sonny", then American slang for a young man. The company traded as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo until it adopted the shorter name in 1958.
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5George Eastman chose the name Kodak because it was what?
- A The surname of his first investor
- B A borrowing from a Native American language
- C A shortening of a chemical process
- D An invented word with no meaning in any language Correct
Answer: D. An invented word with no meaning in any language
Why: He wanted something short, distinctive and impossible to mispronounce, and he had a particular liking for the letter K. Trademark law rewards invented words precisely because nobody else has any claim on them.
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6Volkswagen translates from German as what?
- A Family carriage
- B Public transport
- C People's car Correct
- D Fast wagon
Answer: C. People's car
Why: The company was established under the Nazi state in 1937 to build a cheap car for mass ownership. Civilian production only really began after the war, under British military administration.
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7Nike is named after what?
- A The founder's daughter
- B The Greek goddess of victory Correct
- C A river in Oregon
- D A type of running sole
Answer: B. The Greek goddess of victory
Why: The company traded as Blue Ribbon Sports until 1971. The swoosh was drawn by a design student, Carolyn Davidson, who was paid thirty-five dollars for it.
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8The brand name Haagen-Dazs was created in order to do what?
- A Sound Danish, although it means nothing in Danish Correct
- B Honour the founder's Austrian grandmother
- C Describe a Dutch churning method
- D Combine the surnames of two founders
Answer: A. Sound Danish, although it means nothing in Danish
Why: Reuben Mattus invented it in New York in the 1960s to suggest an old European tradition. Danish does not even use the umlaut that appears in the name.
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9Why did Jeff Bezos name his company after the Amazon?
- A Because he had travelled the river
- B After a Greek myth about warriors
- C Because the first warehouse stood on Amazon Street
- D To suggest enormous size, and because it began with A Correct
Answer: D. To suggest enormous size, and because it began with A
Why: The business was almost called Cadabra, dropped because it sounded like "cadaver" over the telephone. Alphabetical order genuinely mattered in the web directories of the mid-1990s.
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10The name Google is a play on which word?
- A Gaggle, meaning a group
- B Gurgle
- C Googol, the number written as one followed by a hundred zeros Correct
- D Goggle, meaning to stare
Answer: C. Googol, the number written as one followed by a hundred zeros
Why: The founders wanted to suggest indexing an enormous quantity of information. The spelling is usually explained as a mistake made when the domain was registered.
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