It is rightly said that brands are like human beings. They have their own set of personality traits and attribute that tell apart from one another. Just like we known and remember each other through our names, brands also generate memorability through their etymology.

One of the biggest reasons to correctly name your brand is that “first impressions are always the last ones.” We live in a world where nothing sells without a name tag and logo design. Customers favor purchasing products/services which are trademarked rather than nameless merchandise. For instance, people don’t just buy jeans; they purchase a ‘Denim’ or a ‘Levis’. But how are brand names actually generated? Are they randomly formed out of nothing or is there a philosophy behind them?

Here is the philosophy behind naming of 6 major brands of the world that you will find weird and interesting to learn:

1. Caterpillar – The Similarity:

The manufacturer of heavy industrial machinery, Caterpillar, was named after something which has practically no weight at all. The incident behind naming of this corporation is an interesting one. The idea came up one day when a company photographer shouted from a Holt tractor that the movement of the machine is quite similar to a caterpillar squirming on the ground. From that day forward, the name was adopted.

2. Google – By Chance:

The search engine that we all religious rely on is also responsible for a major blunder in their naming. Would you believe that the world Google came out of a typing mistake? The company which was known as “Backrub” initially decided to change their name in 1998 to ‘Googol’, a word for the digit 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name was erroneously written as “Google” and the owners like it better.

3. Adobe – Riverside Inspiration:

Who would have thought that riverside inspiration could be the idea behind naming of a large software corporation? Adobe, commonly known for its creation of Photoshop and Illustrator software for logo designers, was named after ‘Adobe Creek River’ alongside which resided the co-founder John Warnock.

4. Häagen-Dazs –Foreign Appeal:

Most people consider Häagen-Dazs to be a brand originating from a Scandinavian country. But in reality, it is an American brand. The name itself has no meaning nor is it derived from any German or French language. As a matter of fact, these digraphs were made-up just to make the company look Scandinavian to the US consumers. The owner of the brand, Mattus opted for foreign branding, with the philosophy that since Denmark is renowned for its dairy products. Hence the ice-cream brand would appear good in front of the American consumers.

5. Hotmail – Nothing Hot:

Most people assumed that Microsoft owned mail service Hotmail was named to connote hotness. But as it turns out, there is nothing HOT about Hotmail after all. The name “Hotmail” was named using the acronym HTML. Since the mail server was based on HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language, it was named as HoTMaiL originally. But this was later converted simply to Hotmail.

6. Apple – Newton Theory:

We certainly do know how gravity was discovered by Newton. Sitting beneath a tree, all of a sudden an apple dropped over his head. This story purportedly inspired late Steve Jobs, then owner of Technology giant Apple inc. Even though the name of the fruit has no relevance to the nature and scope of the business, the logic behind its naming is fascinating. Much similar to apple motivated Newton into inventing gravity, the company Apple Inc is also in a constant thirst for invention and technological advancements.