From Altoids to Zima

From Altoids to Zima

By Evan Morris

Fireside, 199 pages, $15.95

 

Managing Books, March 2

By Harvey Schachter

 

You probably know there was no Betty Crocker. But there was a Chef Boyardee. As for Dr. Pepper, nobody at the company is quite sure who, if anyone, he or she was.

Those are just some of the odd facts about famous brand names that Evan Morris, author of the syndicated column The Word Detective, has collected in From Altoids to Zima.

When the Washburn Crosby milling company started receiving hundreds of questions in the early 1920s about baking with its products, it decided that the replies would be more personal if they bore the name of a character invented for the purpose.  They combined the warm and friendly name Betty with the surname of a former Washburn executive, William Crocker. When Betty made her radio debut in 1924 in a company-sponsored cooking show, she was actually played by a different actress in each of the 13 cities where the show was broadcast.

Hector Boiardi, whose family immigrated to the United States from Italy when he was 17, worked as a chef at the famed Plaza hotel in New York before opening Il Giardino d’Italia in Cleveland. When patrons kept asking for extra portions to take home, he began packaging it with cheese and pasta for home use. That’s his picture on the label – with the spelling of his name changed to Boyardee to ease pronunciation.

As for Dr. Pepper, one popular theory suggests the inventor of the drink, Charles Adderton, had a crush on the good doctor’s daughter in Waco, Texas. By the way, Mr. Morris reports that the “10-2-4” inscription on its cans and bottles refer to 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 4 p.m., the times when consumers might be slumping in their workday and most need a caffeine hit according to a 1920s Columbia university study. And by the way, there is no period in the company’s name, Dr Pepper.

Some other facts he unearthed:

·       Alpo, one of the first canned dog foods marketed in the U.S., was originally called All-Pro, probably meaning all protein.

·       It was King George IV in 1824 who declared a new steak sauce served to him – which sits on supermarket shelves to this day -- A-1.

·       When Toronto pharmacist and entrepreneur John J. McLaughlin came up with an alternative to the sweet, syrupy ginger ale concoctions available in 1919, he named it Canada Dry Pale Ginger Ale, borrowing from the tradition of referring to wines free from sweetness as dry.

·       Fig Newtons were created by the Kennedy Biscuit Company in Massachusetts, which named all its confections after local towns. It’s therefore named after the Boston suburb of Newton, not scientist Isaac Newton.

·       When Henry John Heinz happened to look up from his newspaper one day while riding an elevated train in New York, he saw an ad for a shoemaker boasting of “21 Styles of Shoes.” He applied that concept – and his favourite lucky number, 57 – to his company’s condiments, even though he was already producing more than 60 varieties.  Today the company has more than 5,000.

·       President Theodore Roosevelt, when served a cup of coffee from Nashville’s Maxwell House hotel, declared it “good to the last drop.”

·       EBay was Pierre Omidyar’s third choice for his new Internet company’s name, but the Internet domains for the others were taken: Auctionweb.com and echobay.com. Phil Knight wanted to call his new athletic shoe company Dimension Four, but picked the eventual name Nike out of a hat in which every employee contributed suggestions. He paid an artist $35 U.S. for the famed swoosh design, although years later made it up by giving her a gold “swoosh” ring and a chunk of Nike stock.  The creator of the famed logo for Apple Computers, on the other hand, was paid with 10 per cent of the young company’s stock.

·       A googol is the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes, an apt precursor for the name of a web site organizing the infinite information of the Web for searches.

·       It took scientists at Rocket Chemical 40 tries to come up with a water placement substance to drive away moisture and prevent rust, giving us WD-40.

The book is a trivia lover’s delight but it also shows the serendipitous ways in which top brand names and their associated images have come into our lives, a counterpoint to the more deliberate approach today, with naming specialists too often concocting unappealing, synthetic monikers.

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In Addition: In How Brands Become Icons (Harvard Business School Press, 265 pages, $44.95), Oxford University professor Douglas Holt looks at the cultural factors that have led products like Snapple, Budweiser, Mountain Dew and Harley Davidson to become icons. His theory of cultural branding suggests these products succeeded by exploiting deep cultural rifts in society, such as Budweiser becoming a beer in Ronald Reagan’s resurgent, macho America for blue collar men feeling emasculated by feminism and angry at jobs being drained to Japanese competition. It’s a provocative theory, beautifully written as he weaves cultural analysis with a history of each product’s television ads. But it’s questionable how essential his theory is, given the authors of the successful marketing efforts he chronicles weren’t setting out to dabble in societal tensions but trying to differentiate their product in a catchy way.