The Making Of A Corporate Brand

Ibuka, Sony’s founder once remarked: "As long as we’re going to produce transistors, let’s make them for a consumer product which anyone can afford to buy. Otherwise we’ll be wasting our time. What I have in mind is a radio. Let’s work on a transistor radio from the beginning, whatever dif-ficulties we may face." Those first radios that we produced also marked another milestone, as they bore the name Sony for the first time. We began to realise that saying Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo would be rather difficult for people to say in non-Japanese-speaking countries. So we decided to come up with a name that could be easily pronounced in any language—anywhere in the world. Given the nature of our business at the time, we worked on the theme of the word ‘sound’ or ‘sonic’, a derivation from the Latin word sonus. The new name had to reflect youthfulness and vitality, as well as an image that we were  still very small, such as that evoked from the word ‘Sonny’. In time, it became Sony.