Sony has gone through several attempts to find the name under which the company is now known worldwide. In this trivia article, we will reveal some history about it.
The name “Sony” is now a familiar term to every gamer, as the company is one of the three largest console manufacturers in the world and a massive gaming publisher. However, Sony was not always known by this name and had to face many challenges before they found their identity.
This was the beginning of Sony: The origins of the entertainment giant trace back to a small electronics shop that opened in early 1946 in a bombed-out department store in Nihonbashi (Tokyo).
With a startup capital of around 3 million dollars (accounting for inflation) and 8 employees, entrepreneurs Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded the company “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo”. In German, it roughly translates to “Tokyo Communication Industry Company”.
The founders were looking for a short and memorable name
This was the first problem: Ibuka and Morita had grand plans for their company and decided to think internationally. Their products needed to be easily marketable abroad, which is why the name of the company should be short, catchy, and memorable.
They initially decided that the company’s name should have a “Romaji” version. This term refers to Japanese words written in Latin letters (in simplified terms).
The first version of the new “international” name was to be the initials of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, hence TTK. However, this already posed the first problem with the name: There was already a railway company in Japan called Tokyo Kyuko which was abbreviated as TTK.
Ibuka and Morita had to come up with another name for their company.
This was the second problem: After the TTK initials were out of question, the company resorted to an acronym. The first syllables of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo were combined to form “Totsuko” and used as a name for some time.
However, during a business trip to the USA, Akio Morita found that Americans had trouble pronouncing Totsuko, so the search for an appealing name continued.
The name “Sony” was originally heavily criticized in Japan
On the third attempt, they decided to borrow from various foreign languages. One of the suggestions was the name “Sony”, which is familiar to us all. The word was composed of two similarly sounding words:
- It was partly derived from the Latin word “Sonus”, which means “sound”. Since the company originally made its money by selling radios, it fit well with their products.
- Sony also reminded people of the Anglicism “Sonnyboy” (sonny / clever boy), which was common in Japan after World War II. It was used for “respectable and smart men”, as Morita and Ibuka believed they were.
Sony was indeed the perfect name for the growing company, which even secured a licensing deal with the already massive company Nokia in the 1950s.
This was the third problem: But another problem arose that almost cost the company its name. Sony was supposed to be written in Latin letters from the start, which at that time was also known as “American script” in Japan. They were thus the first Japanese company to do so.
In the early 1950s, the memory of World War II was still very fresh worldwide, and especially in Japan. The country had fought mainly against the Americans in the Pacific and suffered a heavy defeat. Accordingly, the fact that a Japanese company used “the script of the enemy” instead of Kanji became part of the public debate and was heavily criticized.
It went so far that Sony had problems with their main bank, Mitsui. Mitsui is still one of the largest companies in the world today, and the then-chairman had a strong opinion about Sony’s new name. The bank demanded that the company name be changed to something else, but Akio Morita remained firm and fought for it.
The name “Sony” has now been used unchanged for over 60 years and also adorns the official logo of the company.
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