FIRM FAVOURITES: Business

1. Apple. The company’s name was inspired by Steve Job’s fruitarian diet and a visit to an apple farm. Many myths surround the current logo, an Apple with a bite taken out of it, including that it is a reference to the suicide of Alan Turing using a poisoned apple or to Adam and Eve. The truth is more prosaic. According to its designer the bite is for scale, to avoid confusion with a cherry.

2. Subaru. The Japanese carmaker is a division of Fuji Heavy Industries. The large star is said to represent FHI and the five smaller ones the companies that came together in 1953 to form the larger firm. There are only six stars in the logo because two of the seven stars of the constellation are too close together to distinguish with the naked eye.

3. Mazda. The name is derived from Ahura-Mazda, a Zoroastrian deity associated with wisdom. The firm’s founder, Jujiro Matsuda, was deeply spiritual but may have also been influenced by the mangled western pronunciations of his name.

4. Adidas and Puma. The reason for the enmity between Adolf (“Adi”) Dassler and his brother, Rudolf, is unclear. But it led to the break-up of Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik and the founding of the two sportswear brands. The headquarters of the two firms still stand on opposite banks of the river Aurach in Herzogenaurach, a small town in southern Germany.

5. Google. In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their search-engine program BackRub to emphasise the importance of a website’s “back links”, the number of links from other sites. Later the pair took a fancy to Googol, 1 followed by 100 zeroes, after a brainstorming session. The term was mistyped when checking if the domain name was free and Google stuck instead.

6. Shells. Importing shells from the Far East laid the foundations for an import and export business that sent machinery, textiles and tools to newly industrialising Japan and the Far East and brought back rice, silk, china and copperware to the Middle East and Europe. An interest in oil developed during a trip to Azerbaijan. Petroleum was also produced in the East Indies, a Dutch colony, by the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, which merged with Shell in 1907.

7. Apple used this slogan from 1997 to 2002, causing millions of purists to wince and mutter “Think Differently” under their breaths.

8. De Beers. Created for the diamond mining firm in 1947 by the NW Ayer agency, the campaign was also supposedly responsible for inventing the idea of the diamond engagement ring, which was not the accepted way to seal a proposal of marriage before that time.

9. United Airlines. Created by Leo Burnett in 1965, the airline dropped the tagline in 1996. It was revived in 2013 but four years later the phrase was used to ridicule United after it dragged a paying passenger off one of its overbooked flights.

10. Burger King. BBDO came up with the phrase in 1973 and it was used widely for decades. In 2014 the company partly revived the idea with a new tagline: “Be Your Way”.

11. Volkswagen. Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) came up with the phrase in 1959 to convince Americans to end their love affair with the vast gas guzzlers made in Detroit and choose a small German car, the Beetle, instead.

12. Avis. The slogan came from DDB in 1962, as the car-hire firm, perennially second to Hertz, was attempting to reverse several years of losses. It seemed to work, returning the company to profit. The slogan was dropped in 2012 in favour of “It’s Your Space”.

13. James Cash Penney. The American department store magnate set up his first shop with two partners in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902. The firm now has over 1,000 outlets across America.

14. Frank Winfield Woolworth. The first Woolworth store was opened in Utica, New York, in 1878. The name still survives in Austria, Germany and Mexico. The FootLocker chain of sporting goods stores is a direct descendant.

15. Leon Leonwood Bean. Founded in 1912 in Freeport, Maine, the clothing firm’s headquarters are a short walk from the company’s original shop.

16. The label was founded in Los Angeles in 1962 by Herb Alpert (a trumpet player who also found fame with The Tijuana Brass) and Jerry Moss. The company was one of the world’s biggest independent record companies and boasted the Carpenters, The Police and Bryan Adams among the stars on its label. It eventually became part of Polygram in 1989 and then Universal Music in 1998.

17. From Joseph Cyril Bamford. The giant construction-equipment firm was founded in 1945 to build agricultural tipping trailers and is still owned by members of the Bamford family.

18. Ingvar Kamprad’s initials have been added to the initial of the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd, and the village he calls home, Agunnaryd. Have a mark if you got Ingvar Kamprad, who founded the firm in 1943 as a mail-order business and began to sell furniture five years later.

19. Forrest Mars and William Bruce Murrie. Forrest Mars, a member of the family confectionery firm, copied the idea when he saw British soldiers eating Smarties, chocolate covered in a hard sugar coating that did not melt in the heat, during the Spanish civil war. Murrie became involved because he was part of the Hershey family, which controlled chocolate rationing during the war.

20. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey. Louis Vuitton founded his luggage company in Paris in 1854. Claude Moët began making champagne in 1743 and was joined by Pierre-Gabriel Chandon in 1833. The Cognac firm was founded by Richard Hennessy in 1765 and joined forces with Moët in 1971. The firm was formed when the two companies merged again in 1987 and is now the world’s biggest luxury-goods company with some 70 brands including Dior and Givenchy.

21. Yahoo. The species was described as filthy and unpleasant and the term later came to be used for loutish behaviour. But the company’s name also in part derives from the acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.

22. International Business Machines. Nicknamed “Big Blue”, the IT and consulting firm was incorporated in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, but its origins go back to the end of the 19th century.

23. Bayerische Motoren Werke. The firm was founded in 1916 to construct aero-engines and started making cars only in 1928 under licence from Britain’s Austin. It began designing its own cars in 1932.

24. Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino. The company was founded in 1899 and a year later opened its first factory from which emerged 24 cars a year. Fiat, under the Agnelli family, eventually went on to own Ferrari, Maserati and Lancia. In 2014 Fiat and the American carmaker Chrysler merged to form FCA.

25. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. The company was founded in 1902 to mine corundum. Though this venture was largely unsuccessful, the company turned to other materials and other products. In 1925 a young technician invented “Scotch” masking tape and in 1980 it introduced Post-It notes, adding to the range of products it makes today for a wide variety of applications.

26. Lucky Goldstar. The South Korean conglomerate was formed in 1958 through the merger of two Korean companies, Lak-Hui (pronounced “Lucky”) and GoldStar. The former sold household goods while Goldstar made electronic products such as radios, TVs, fridges, washing machines and air conditioners. The corporate name was change to LG in 1995. The slogan “Life’s Good” is a “backronym”.

27. Niki Lauda. Lauda came out of retirement in 1982 and went on to win the championship again in 1984. Lauda Air became a subsidiary of Austrian Airlines in 2000, which retained the branding on planes until 2013.

28. Salvador Dali. Despite painting melting clocks and keeping a pet ocelot called Babou, the most surreal act of the famous Spanish artist may well be his association with Chupa Chups. He designed the logo in 1969 for his friend and the founder of the company, Enric Bernat, while the pair ate lunch at a restaurant.

29. Pierce & Pierce. Bateman is a specialist in mergers and acquisitions at the fictional firm. Sherman McCoy, the “master of the universe” in Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, worked at the same firm.

30. Up in the Air. Many of those fired by the corporate downsizing expert in the film, released in 2009, are not actors but people who had been recently laid off work.

31. Tyrell Corporation. The film is adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In fact, it is left somewhat ambiguous whether Deckard is an android though the director subsequently insisted that he was.

32. 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic, based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, HAL, a sentient computer, tries to kill the crew of a spacecraft on route to Jupiter after they question the purpose of the mission. Artificial intelligence cheerleaders take note.

33. Oceanic Airlines. The name has turned up repeatedly in film and television, most famously in Lost. The crash of Oceanic flight 815 on a mysterious island was the start of six seasons of entertaining bafflement for viewers.

34. Croydon. The airport’s origins go back to the first world war, when the Royal Flying Corps were stationed at Beddington to intercept Zeppelins attacking London. In 1920 London’s airport was moved from a temporary aerodrome on Hounslow Heath to Croydon. Croydon to Paris became the world’s busiest air route.

35. Le Bourget. The airport, opened in 1919, was the spot where Charles Lindbergh landed in Spirit of St. Louis after the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927. It now serves business jets and is home to the Paris Air Show, one of the world’s biggest aviation get-togethers.

36. Andy Warhol. The American pop artist began his career as a commercial artist working for magazines but in the early 1960s began making art based on mass-produced images from American popular culture. By some estimates his estate was worth $510 million at the time of his death in 1987.

37. Calvin Coolidge. He made his famous remark in an address to the Society of American Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC, in 1925. On hearing of the death of the famously reserved president, nicknamed “Silent Cal”, Dorothy Parker, a renowned American wit, is reported to have remarked, “How can they tell?”

38. Warren Buffett. Mr Buffett, nicknamed the “sage of Omaha”, is one of the most successful investors of all time. Berkshire Hathaway, his investment firm, owns or has big stakes in many well-known firms including Netjets, Kraft Heinz and Coca-Cola.

39. Winston Churchill. Britain’s wartime prime minister had a seemingly insatiable appetite for cigars and champagne. He was also a prolific author, partly because he often faced large debts from the cost of his high-living lifestyle.

40. America. The United States leads the pack, accounting for around a fifth of total world output, closely followed by Russia.

41. Russia. Russia and Saudi Arabia have swapped places in recent years. America is in third place.

42. China. The country is by far the world’s biggest producer of coal, followed by America, India and Australia.

43. Czech Republic. According to Kirin, a Japanese brewer, Czechs drank 142.4 litres per head in 2015, the equivalent of 250 pints. Fortunately Czech brewers make cheap and excellent beer.

44. L’Oréal. In 1907 Eugène Schueller, the company’s founder, was the first person to sell synthetic hair dye. He called his new product Auréole. Liliane Bettencourt, L’Oréal’s main shareholder, is said to be the world’s richest woman.

45. Comcast. The American firm is the world’s biggest media and TV company by revenue. It was founded in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1963 as a cable TV firm with 1,200 subscribers.

46. Intel. The world’s biggest chipmaker was founded in 1968 and its name is a contraction of Integrated Electronics.

47. Google. Larry Page met Sergey Brin for the first time when he went to Stanford University as a prospective PhD student. Brin was his tour guide.

48. Alibaba. Mr Ma founded China’s answer to Amazon in 1999 after two previous internet ventures failed. Its IPO in 2014 was the world’s biggest public stock offering and it has made Mr Ma China’s richest man.

49. Uber. The ride-hailing firm, founded in 2009, now operates in early 600 cities around the world, is hated by cab drivers and is so large and successful that it has, like Google, become a verb—to “Uber it”. Mr Kalanick resigned as chief executive in June 2017.

50. The Washington Post. Mr Bezos, who vies with Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, bought the paper for $250 million in 2013.