What’s in a Name?
- tripping8
- Apr 18
- 15 min read
There is an enduring belief - mostly held by consultants and other indoor creatures - that a name is everything. That within a few syllables lie destiny, legacy, and shareholder value. One imagines Eve, cradling a shiny apple, workshopping “Macintosh” in a focus group of serpents. Or Prometheus, pausing mid-fire-theft to ponder whether "Torch Inc." had more brand equity than “LightCo.” In truth, names rarely arrive from Olympus on a cloud of divine intention. More often, they stumble in the side door, sticky with compromise, ego, or an ill-timed joke. Naming is less an act of inspiration than one of negotiated surrender.
Of course, we dress it all up later. We craft origin myths to make the whole thing seem inevitable, like the brand sprang fully formed from the forehead of a minor Norse deity accompanied by a trademark lawyer. But behind the curtain, it’s more often just someone’s cousin thumbing through a dictionary or a typo on a business license. A forgotten placeholder becomes “a bold gesture toward minimalism.” What began as a scribble on a napkin after three espressos and a panic attack becomes, in hindsight, “visionary." A boardroom silence that lasted so long someone finally said, “Fine, just call it that.” Branding, after all, is the art of making a lucky accident look like a masterstroke.
We all know that half the battle in business wars comes down to name recognition. If you recognize a company’s name, you’re more likely to trust and purchase their product regularly. Which brings us to the main event: a brief look at some of the naming stories that didn’t quite go according to plan. These aren’t the slick, carefully engineered tales that get told at investor dinners and brand symposiums. These are the strange, occasionally accidental, and gloriously unhinged origin stories of some of the world’s most recognizable brand names.
The kind of stories that suggest the line between genius and nonsense is both thin and heavily trademarked. What’s in a name? Sometimes, absolutely nothing - and that’s where the magic - and the spin - begins.
When it comes to naming one of the most iconic children’s toys of all time, the whole thing actually came together very simply. LEGO was founded by a Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Kristiansen back in 1932, and the name he chose came straight from the heart - or at least the mother tongue. He combined two Danish words, “leg godt,” meaning “play well,” which is about as earnest and straightforward as you can get. No branding agency, no soul-searching vision quest - just a quiet little nod to fun and functionality.
The Kristiansen family still owns the company. It’s been passed down like a cherished heirloom - except instead of a dusty grandfather clock, it’s a billion-dollar plastic empire that occasionally gets stuck under the fridge. In a world where family-owned anything is now mostly limited to dry cleaners and late-night diners, LEGO stands out like a cheerful Scandinavian unicorn.
No mergers, no hostile takeovers - just good, clean interlocking fun.
Long after the name was chosen, someone discovered that lego just so happens to mean “I put together” in Latin, the language of Caesar and papal bulls. Divine coincidence? Vatican-level PR stunt? Or maybe just the universe tipping its hat to a beloved toy that was always destined to click. Either way, it's a naming miracle so perfect you'd almost believe it was reverse-engineered by monks with a fondness for building blocks.
The folks at Delta Airlines didn’t name their company after the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. Of course, we just came from LEGO, where a simple Danish phrase accidentally doubled as perfect Latin. So, it’s tempting to assume that “Delta” must be loaded with similar layered meaning: a nod to change, disruption, or some kind of Greco-Roman metaphor for the arc of modern air travel. But no. The origin of the name is far less mythological and far more muddy.
In reality, the name "Delta" was chosen not for its abstract symbolism but for its geography. The company that would become Delta Airlines began nearly a century ago as a crop-dusting outfit called Huff Daland Dusters - a name that sounds less like an airline and more like a Dust Bowl-era barbershop quartet.
Their mission was simple: fly low over fields in the southernmost part of the Mississippi River region and spray for boll weevils. That area, where the river spills into the Gulf of Mexico, is known as the Mississippi Delta. And when the time came to grow the business and pick a name that didn’t sound like an industrial vacuum cleaner, they chose to honor the land beneath their wings.
So no, it wasn’t about Greek letters or philosophical nods to transformation - it was about a swamp. A noble, rich, agriculturally significant swamp, but a swamp, nonetheless. And yet somehow, the name endured. By 1929, Delta had taken to the skies with commercial passenger flights, leaving the boll weevils behind and embracing a future full of tray tables and cabin announcements. Sometimes a name doesn’t need to be clever - it just needs to stick. And “Delta,” in all its accidental elegance, most certainly did.
The origin of Virgin is exactly the kind of story that makes branding experts and PR spin doctors shift uncomfortably in their ergonomic chairs. It didn’t go through layers of strategic workshops or a rigorous naming matrix. No Latin roots, no mythological allusions, no subtle plays on meaning. It came, quite literally, from a moment of adolescent honesty. When Richard Branson and his co-founder Nik Powell were brainstorming names for their fledgling record store in the early 1970s, someone in the group (it’s still unclear exactly who) casually suggested Virgin - because, as they put it, “we’re complete virgins at business.”
That was it. No incense, no omens, no family crests. Just a self-deprecating remark that stuck. And in a twist of irony that only the branding gods could arrange, the name that began as a joke about inexperience would come to represent one of the most aggressively confident brands in the world. Virgin quickly expanded beyond vinyl and into airlines, trains, mobile phones, health clubs, and even space travel - hardly the resume of a wallflower. Somewhere along the way, Virgin stopped meaning “new to this” and started meaning “we’re about to disrupt the hell out of your industry, please fasten your seatbelt.”
Of course, in hindsight, it was a masterstroke. The name was bold, a little cheeky, and totally unforgettable - qualities that mirrored Branson’s own personal brand to a T. While other companies went for safe and sanitized, Virgin leaned into risk and rebellion, cloaked in a name that still makes boardrooms blink. It’s the kind of branding origin story that would never make it out of a pitch deck today - but maybe that’s exactly why it worked.
The name Adidas sounds like something a focus group in a sleek Berlin loft might have dreamt up - short, punchy, vaguely futuristic, and just foreign enough to seem premium. But as it turns out, it’s not an acronym, not a marketing invention, and definitely not “All Day I Dream About Sports,” no matter what your gym teacher told you.
The truth is far more human, and frankly, a little petty. The name comes from Adolf Dassler, a German cobbler with a gift for making shoes and a talent for feuding with his brother.
In the 1920s, Adolf and his brother Rudolf ran a shoe company together out of their mother’s laundry room in the small town of Herzogenaurach, Germany. Business was good (they even got Jesse Owens to wear their shoes in the 1936 Olympics),
but family harmony was not. The brothers eventually had a falling out so dramatic it split not only the business but the entire town. Rudolf stormed off and started his own company across the river, calling it Ruda (which he later rebranded as Puma, because that sounded cooler and presumably less like an angry sneeze). Adolf, meanwhile, took his nickname, Adi, and the first syllable of his last name, Dassler, and mashed them together into Adidas.
And thus, two of the world’s biggest sportswear brands were - born not from athletic ideals or corporate synergy, but from a sibling spat worthy of the Royal family. Adidas wasn’t named to inspire dreams or performance - it was just a man stamping his name on a shoe and drawing a territorial line in the sand. But hey, nothing motivates innovation quite like trying to outrun your brother’s success.
The name Samsung might now conjure sleek phones, giant TVs, and a sort of quiet omnipresence in your digital life - but its origin is very much old-school, humble, and rooted in a time before anyone was worrying about pixels per inch. The company was founded in 1938 by a Korean entrepreneur named Lee Byung-chul, and back then, Samsung was exporting dried fish, noodles, and groceries. Tech empire? Not quite. More like your local convenience store, with dreams.
The name itself comes from the Korean words sam (three) and sung (stars). So yes, Samsung literally means “three stars.” Lee chose it deliberately to symbolize something big, bright, and everlasting - three being a number associated with strength and greatness in traditional Korean culture. The stars were meant to represent durability, success, and cosmic-level ambition. You don’t name your grocery business after the stars unless you’re planning to go interstellar, or at least beat the pants off Sony in a few decades.
And while the original logo did in fact include three literal stars,
those were eventually dropped as the company evolved, streamlined, and pivoted. What started as a small trading company became a juggernaut so entwined with South Korea’s economy that it’s practically a constellation in its own right. In hindsight, naming your company after celestial bodies might seem a bit grandiose when you’re just selling noodles - but in Samsung’s case, it’s aged extremely well.
The name Sony feels so sleek and international you’d swear it came out of a branding agency with too much glass and not enough furniture. It's short, smooth, easy to pronounce in almost any language, and carries a faint whiff of futuristic minimalism - like it might also be the name of a robot who writes poetry. But behind that polished façade is a slightly clumsy, very human naming story, cobbled together in postwar Japan by two engineers trying to launch a tech company in a bombed-out economy.
Sony began in 1946 as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha - which translates roughly to “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.” Rolls right off the tongue, right? It was the sort of name that screamed lab coats, government contracts, and long afternoons filled with acronyms. But as the company started to eye international markets in the 1950s, they realized something critical: Westerners could barely pronounce it, let alone remember it.
They needed something new. Something short. Something… catchy.
Enter Sony. It was a mashup of “sonus,” the Latin word for sound, and “sonny,” a term of endearment used in the U.S. at the time, which the founders thought captured the company’s youthful energy. It was an awkward compromise at first - neither fully Latin nor fully English, and not even remotely Japanese. But it stuck. And over time, that invented word became synonymous with craftsmanship, cutting-edge electronics, and the general sound your wallet made when you bought a Walkman in 1987. It’s a name that started with a kind of shrug and ended up on the side of skyscrapers.
The name Pepsi is so ingrained in the modern psyche it barely registers as a word anymore – it’s just there, like gravity, as if it was always meant to be shouted from stadium jumbotrons and scrawled across vending machines from Atlanta to Abu Dhabi. But its origin is far less glossy than the branding would have you believe. The drink was first formulated in 1893 by a North Carolina pharmacist named Caleb Bradham, who wasn’t looking to start a soda empire - he was trying to cure indigestion. In a moment of marketing inspiration (or indigestion) he called it Brad’s Drink.
Which, we grant, is catchier than “Brad’s Bloat-B-Gone.”
By 1898, Bradham had the good sense to rebrand. The name he chose was Pepsi-Cola, a nod to dyspepsia, the medical term for indigestion, which his drink was supposedly helping to relieve.
The “Cola” part referenced the kola nut, a then-popular ingredient in tonic-style beverages, and a not-so-subtle way of positioning it in the same league as that other famous brown elixir from Atlanta. So yes, one of the world’s most aggressively carbonated brands is, at its root, named after a stomach ailment. A peculiar start, but also a reflection of how early soft drinks often straddled the line between medicine and refreshment.
Of course, Pepsi isn’t really about digestion anymore - unless you're talking market share. But the name stuck, and over the decades it was scrubbed of its medicinal baggage and recast as something energetic, youthful, and endlessly marketable. Funny how a name born from discomfort could end up being a global brand synonymous with pop culture and Super Bowl ads. Somewhere, Bradham must be very proud. Now that’s marketing alchemy!
The name Outback Steakhouse evokes images of rugged terrain, dusty roads, crocodiles lurking just off-screen, and a bloke named Mick offering you a “bloomin’ onion” with a wink and a knife that doubles as a machete. You’d be forgiven for assuming it’s an Australian company with some kangaroo-backed investment from the Australian Tourism Board. But you’d be wrong: it’s entirely American, born in Tampa, Florida, in 1988 by a group of four friends who had never set foot down under.
Wanting to create a casual dining experience with a strong, memorable theme, the founders hired a high-profile PR firm to help name the place. After weeks of creative brand soul-searching, the PR firm convened a grand reveal, complete with charts and mock-ups, bringing with them an intern who was new to the firm, still in university finishing his degree. The crown jewel of the agencies pitch? “Crocodile Dundee’s” – a blatant nod to the hit 1986 film.
The room nodded, slightly unsure. Then one of the four turned to the intern and asked what he thought.
After a long, awkward pause, the intern responded, “I think it’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” A stunned silence ensued. He elaborated: the movie might be hot now, but it wouldn't be forever. He'd just returned from a trip to Australia and suggested something more timeless - Outback.
It captured a mood, a myth, a rough and ready, dusty kind of magic. The founders loved it. The PR firm didn’t. The intern was fired before the elevator doors closed. But the next day, the four founders hired him back - as VP of Marketing for a steakhouse that would one day span the globe.
Sometimes the best branding ideas comes not from the boardroom, but from someone willing to call nonsense when they smell it - preferably with a side of fries and ranch dressing.
The name Spam has an odd way of slipping into every conversation, even when it's not invited. At this point, it’s practically shorthand for anything artificial, unwanted, or suspiciously shelf-stable. But long before it was clogging inboxes, Spam was just... lunch. Salty, gelatinous lunch in a little blue can. And its name? As mysterious as its contents, which is saying something.
Hormel introduced Spam in 1937 as a way to sell surplus pork shoulder - an unglamorous cut of meat that needed a serious PR boost. The product was fully cooked, long-lasting, and didn't require refrigeration, making it perfect for picnics, pantries, and eventually, battlefields. It became a staple during World War II, when fresh meat was scarce and anything that could survive a tropical climate in a tin was practically gold.
The origin of the name Spam is still debated, but the most widely accepted version is that it’s a mash-up of “spiced” and “ham.” Legend has it that the name was suggested at a company party by the brother of a Hormel executive who, for his trouble, won a grand prize of... $100. That’s it. No royalties, no naming rights, just a hundred bucks and a footnote in canned meat history. Hormel has always been a little vague about where the name originated from and even vaguer about what exactly goes into Spam, which they insist is just “a trademark with no meaning.”
But it worked. Spam became a postwar icon, especially in places like Hawaii and South Korea, where it’s considered a comfort food, not a punchline.
It’s the edible equivalent of a cult film - mocked in some circles, revered in others, and inexplicably still in production. You can question the ingredients, you can question the name - but you can't question its staying power.
TARGET
The name Target is one of those branding moves that feels almost too obvious in retrospect - so clean, so confident, so bluntly American it might as well come with a free bald eagle sticker. But that simplicity was exactly the point. When the Dayton Company, a venerable Minneapolis department store chain,
launched a new discount store in 1962, amazingly, they opened the first store without a name. Though they knew they were aiming - quite literally - for the mass market. A store that could sell everything anybody could ever want.
The story goes that a group of executives and marketing folks sat around brainstorming what to call this bold new retail experiment. They were committed to a red-and-white bullseye color scheme that could draw attention and they wanted something that sounded sharp and modern, something that stood out from the stodgy “department store” image without sounding cheap. So, the company’s publicity director suggested “Target” - a word that not only evoked precision and aspiration, but also had just the right amount of retail swagger.
After all, a store with 75 different departments would be the perfect “target” for everyone’s retail needs. And the name and the imagery hit the mark from day one. (Pun unavoidable)
But the genius of the name is how it walks the line between high and low, luxury and accessibility. Target wasn’t promising couture; it was promising good taste at a good price - what the company would later cheekily brand as “Tar-zhay,” a faux-French nickname bestowed by customers who saw it as the upscale cousin of the usual bargain-bin chaos. It’s a name that’s both literal and aspirational, utilitarian and a little tongue-in-cheek. In other words, exactly what it needed to be. Because if you’re going to sell everything from toilet paper to throw pillows, you’d better know how to shoot straight.
The name Google is now so baked into daily life it’s become a verb, a reflex, a slightly unsettling extension of human memory. But before it was the world’s default answer machine, it was a math joke - albeit one that started with a typo.
Back in 1997, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still Stanford graduate students toying with the idea of organizing the entire internet (as one does), they needed a name for their fledgling search engine. Initially they planned to call their search engine “Back Rub”, a reference to the so-called “backlinks” of the then-primitive worldwide web. But they weren’t thrilled with the name. They wanted something that captured the vastness of the web, the sheer unfathomable scale of information it could crawl. So, they settled on a nod to the word googol - a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.
When checking to see if the domain googol.com was available, one of their fellow students, Sean Anderson, accidentally typed “google” instead. It wasn’t taken. It was short, snappy, and still captured the essence of absurdly massive numbers - if anything, it sounded even more like something a computer would say before gaining sentience. Page and Brin, demonstrating either excellent instinct or deep fatigue, decided to roll with it. Google.com was born.
It’s a little ironic, of course, that a company built on precision and algorithms got its name from a spelling error. But it tracks. The tech world has a long tradition of happy accidents becoming billion-dollar branding. And Google had that perfect blend of goofy and futuristic - like a word made up by a very smart child or a very friendly AI. Which, in hindsight, is pretty much what it became.
In the end, naming a brand is a bit like naming a racehorse after three whiskeys and a lost bet - you just hope it crosses the finish line before anyone asks too many questions. Sure, there are consultants and brand strategists and naming architects who’ll tell you it’s all about market positioning and linguistic resonance. A name, we’re told, must encapsulate vision, values, market fit - and spiritual alignment with the Q4 earnings report.
But most of the names we remember didn’t come from whiteboards or wargames. They came from inside jokes, grudges, flukes, and at least one courageous intern who looked a room full of adults in the eye and said, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” And thank god he did.
Because every once in a while, when someone at the bottom of the food chain finds the courage to speak truth to PowerPoint, it reminds us that bravery isn’t always about standing at the podium – sometimes it’s about refusing to nod along with madness while everyone else takes notes.
Because while the myth of branding is built on precision, its history is held together by accidents and audacity. After all, we’ve heard tales of typos, tantrums, turf wars, and serendipitous Latin. It turns out the real secret behind a great name isn’t celestial destiny or Jungian archetypes - it’s conviction. That strange, unteachable confidence that allows someone to say, “Yeah, let’s call it that,” and then back it up with enough guts to make it stick. There’s something deeply reassuring about that. It means you don’t need divine inspiration or an ancient Greek thesaurus - just conviction, timing, and maybe a little reckless confidence. Like the kind that gets you fired right after the lunch meeting ends and rehired before dinner.
Branding, like most things in both business and barbecuing, is part art, part accident, and part showmanship. So, the next time someone tells you a name needs to be perfect, remember: perfection is overrated, and hindsight has a great publicist. The best names are the ones that survive the chaos - not because they were right, but because someone, somewhere, believed in them hard enough to fight for it. Or at the very least, had the guts to say, “Screw it. Call it that and pass the fries.”
Pretty darned awesome! I love the obvious and the accidental! My favorite fact is that the family of the guy who invented Lego’s still owns the company! I loved Lego’s, my girls loved Lego’s and my grandkids love Lego’s!
Adidas and Puma created by two angry brothers! This was so cool ….. Outback, Pepsi etc! Love it!