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Famous brands are not built in a day. They take years of hard-line marketing and promotional efforts to build. The cost of branding famous brands reflects the amount of work included in establishing a corporate name. There is always a certain history attached to prominent brands.
A few months back, I did a post on interesting facts about graphic design, where I shared 15 fun facts related to the world of graphic design. As my readers enjoyed learning about those unknown facts, I decided to come up with something similar today.
It is always fascinating to discover what your favorite brands were in the past. For example, how would you feel knowing that Coca Cola, the beverage you consume the most, was once called “coca wine”, sold as a medicine?
Following are 10 fascinating brand stories that are attached to famous brands.
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1. Apple – The inspiration:
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| In 1976 Steve Jobs was working in a community type farm in Oregon which inspired him to name the company Apple Computers. Co-founder Wozniak believes Steve might have got this name idea either from the farm or because of his music tastes in Apple Records which was quite popular with Beatles. |
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2. Adobe – The River:
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| Adobe Systems was incorporated in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The name evolved from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, a river that ran behind the house of one of the company’s founders. |
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3. CISCO – The confused acronym:
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| CISCO is popularly confused as the acronym for ‘Computer Information System Company’. The name "Cisco" was actually derived from the city name, San Francisco, which is why the company’s engineers insisted on using the lower case "cisco" in the early days. |
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4. Google – The Back Rub:
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| Did you know that the search engine you use frequently was once named ‘backrub’? Google was created in 1996 under the name "BackRub". Moreover, the Google name change in 1998 came as a spelling mistake of the word “googol”. |
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5. Hewlett Packard – The coin toss:
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| We’ve seen coin toss at the start of sports games. But deciding the name of a company through a coin flip? That is how HP got its name. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. |
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6. Mercedes – The fair lady:
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| The famous car brand Mercedes was originally named after Emil Jellineks’ daughter, Mercédès Jellinek. Emil Jellineks was the man who specified an engine designed by Wilhelm Maybach and Gottlieb Daimler that formally bore his daughter’s name. |
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7. Pepsi Cola – The wine
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| Pepsi originated in 1893 under the name of “Brad’s Drink”. It was named after the pharmacist Celeb Bradham. In 1898, Brad’s Drink was renamed "Pepsi-Cola". The name change was apparently due to digestive enzyme pepsin and kola nuts used in the formula. |
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8. Intel – The hard to get trademark:
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| Did you know that the company we know as Intel, could have been ‘Moore Noyce’? Founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore sought this name for their new company but circumstantially that name was already trademarked by a hotel chain. Hence the acronym of INTegrated Electronics was adopted. |
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9. Sony – The slang terminology:
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| This giant brand was established under the name of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) in 1946. But the firm changed its name to “Sony” in 1958, an amalgamation of two words “sonus” and “sonny”. The English slang word "sonny" means smart, young and presentable. |
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10. Yahoo!
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| One of the most prominent search engines we know as Yahoo! was initially named "Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web". This was named after the founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. The term Yahoo! is an abbreviation for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". |
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If you know more interesting facts about famous brands, do share them with us.
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[...] decir que el gato al agua se lo llevó Bill Hewlett. Esta es una de las 10 curiosidades sobre marcas famosas como Google, Apple, Adobe, Yahoo! o Cisco, entre [...]