The names of some big brands were built on brain farts.
They were thrown together from whatever objects were lying around the room, or from some dubious inside joke.
No outsider can make sense of them.
It has nothing to do with the brand.
From a distance, it isn't even funny.
And yet, it was a huge hit. For example:
- Adobe was the name of the creek behind the founder's house,
- Häagen-Dazs was invented from scratch to sound Danish (a language that doesn't even have an ä),
- Miramax is a blend of the Weinstein parents: Miriam and Max,
- Yahoo comes from the brutes in Gulliver's Travels, whom the founders identified with,
- Les 3 Suisses comes from the three daughters of Mr. Suis, the owner of the bistro next door.
You could call it unserious. A who-cares approach to naming.
I see it instead as the sign of a philosophy that, in some cases, can explain the success that followed.
Because to found a brand, you have to embody it.
It really is a birth.
You put a part of yourself into it that will then, you hope, bear fruit and grow out in the world.
Now, I've said this before: logic is common to everyone. Two and two make four, whoever you are.
So if you use logic to name your brand, you create a name others could have come up with.
Your own DNA, unique, inimitable, isn't in it.
Whereas by going with the brain fart, you do two things:
First, you pick a name no one else could find. Because it comes from a moment, a place, or a reference that exists only for you.
Second, it proves you've understood that everything counts.
That moment, that place, those people are worth no less than the rest.
That instant, that joke, that reference are worth no less because they don't rest on reasoning.
On the contrary. It happened. That day. That hour. Just as it was.
It came out of you. Without forcing. Without a filter.
It's a piece of your biography.
And that has value.
Period.
Now that confidence, that ability to step away from convention and own who you are in public, even when it's illogical, even when you know it will make sense to no one...
It's often the mark of people who go far.