Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…He’s a total zealot. He is like, all right, we’ve got this killer product. We’re first to market. We’re basically going to invent this whole market. We need a name for the product. We need something that’s going to make consumers know to ask for this product, for our watches. We need to coin the term for the industry. He’s inspired here by the Kodak camera, which by then had been around for a while and was made not by the Kodak company, but by the Eastman company. Kodak, I believe, was the first invented product brand name, and it was a name that meant nothing. I think that’s right, and it intentionally meant nothing. It was easy to pronounce, it was easy to say. You could see it once. It was very memorable. It worked in any language. It was five letters. It had a great sound to it. Supposedly Eastman came up with the name Kodak, with his mother using an anagram set. He said that there were three principle concepts that he was looking for in the name. One, it should be short, easy to pronounce, it should work in any language, and it should not resemble any other name or be associated with anything else. Anyway, Hans takes inspiration from this, and he decides that he needs a Kodak for his new wristwatch. He writes, “I tried combining the letters of the alphabet in every possible way. This gave some a hundred names, but none of them felt quite right. It was one morning when I was sitting on the upper level of a double decker bus,” powered at that time by horses, “driving alongside Cheapside in London, that a good genie whispered in my ear, Rolex.” He’s good at mythmaking.…

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