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| When,
back in 1953, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka were looking for a new name for
their company, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha, they spent many days
writing down possibilities, discussing them, and discarding them before,
one day, they came across the Latin word sonus, meaning ‘sound’.
"The word itself seemed to have sound in it," says Morita in his book Made In Japan. "Our business was full of sound so we began to zero in on sonus. And we also thought of ourselves as ‘sonny-boys’ in those days. Unfortunately, in Japan the word ‘sonny’ would be pronounced ‘sohn-nee’, which means to lose money. We pondered this problem for a little while and the answer struck me one day: why not just drop one of the letters and make it ‘Sony’? That was it! The new name had the advantage of not meaning anything but ‘Sony’ in any language; it was easy to remember, and it carried the connotations we wanted." ‘Sony’, we’d argue, also has one other vital quality that is all too often overlooked when it comes to thinking up brand names: euphony. |
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