Branding and Technology – Request For Your Input

An interesting program that I attended this past week got me thinking quite a bit about doing some research and writing in how technology companies initially came up with their names and monikers, both product-wise and company-wise. I’ve always been fascinated with the myriad of names that this industry has applied to its business name and product sets.

The program I’m referring to was part of a the monthly MENG program, this one is the NY City meeting, usually held during the first week of each month. If you are a marketer, it’s worthwhile to try to attend. At this particular meeting our presenter was Lynn Altman, president of Brand Now. She did a nice job on getting a good size group of us to participate in creating tag lines and buzz about a company or product in a brainstorming, quick-hit atmosphere.

So my simple request is….to help me compile a list of interesting products (ex. Java from Sun), company names (Oracle/Microsoft/etc), product codenames (Longhorn for example for Microsoft) and logos that someone has an interesting story or history about. You can put these in comment form as part of this Blog, or send them to me, rgseverini@rgsmanagement.com

I’ll do my best to re-post the results in Blog format or via a spreadsheet.

To kick this off, I was involved with branding and then re-branding a company called Mint Communications aka Mint Technologies. As an example, a staff member came up with the tag line:

Putting Your Business in Mint Condition
and the company used Mint – the color green and even mints and mint chocolates as giveaways.
And of course Mint by the very nature of the term relates to quality. So all the connections were being made around this international company and its tagline, company name and permutations. Mint was purchased by Sungard and eventually we re-branded to Sungard Integration. Mint then became associated with the product set names and there we are today.

I am also amazed at all the Greek derivatives that came out of the technology community. We can easily point to Project Athena at MIT as a prime example of exactly that – although I’m not sure if these turned out to be actual products.

I’d love to hear about your favorites.