What's in a name? Roses smell sweet whatever you call them, but they're unlikely to sell as well if termed, say, "chopped veg." Branding (from the Old English brond, "a piece of burning wood" and, later, "an identifying mark made by a hot iron") is the biggest of all verbal businesses—and a more ancient one than you might think. The oldest known brand name was found in the ruins of Pompeii on a wine jar. It reads Vesuvinum, a punning contraction of Vesuvius (the local volcano) and the Latin vinum (wine), and dates from 79 AD, the year Vesuvius explosively ended viticulture in the region. As long as there's been trade, however, the place a product was made has served as a promise of its quality—especially where consumables are concerned. Take sherry (from Jerez, in Spain), port (from Porto, in Portugal), Parmesan (from Parma, in Italy) or even Cheddar.
Yet it is only in modern times that the power of a good brand has come into its own. In 1870, a Scot, John Johnston, developed what he temptingly termed Johnston's Fluid Beef as a marching food for Napoleon III's army. The substance seemed as doomed as France's troops, until Johnston hit upon a new name: a combination of the Latin bos, "of the ox," with a word from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel The Coming Race, in which a civilisation of flying reptiles live inside the earth and gain vast powers by drinking a fictional fluid, vril. Thus was born Bovril.
A nobler literary borrowing has given us one of the super-brands of the 21st century: Starbucks, named after Ahab's first mate in Moby Dick. But linguistic pedigree is of small concern to markets. Witness the triumph of US ice-cream giants Häagen-Dazs, whose name is a confection of pseudo-Scandinavian appearance that sounds classy, but means precisely nothing.
