We don’t know the name of the first brand. What we do know is that up a grassy mountainside a few millennia ago, a big Norse farmer was getting a bit annoyed about having his cows stolen.
The easiest way of getting into someone’s mind is to be first. It is very easy to remember who is first, and much more difficult to remember who is second. Even if the second entrant offers a better product, the first mover has a large advantage that can make up for other shortcomings.
In the beginning, choice was not a problem. When our earliest ancestor wondered “What’s for dinner?” the answer wasn’t very complicated. It was whatever animal in the neighborhood he could run down, kill, and drag back to the cave.
According to that notable macro-economist Frank Zappa, you aren’t a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It also helps if you have a decent football team and some nuclear weapons, he added, but at the very least you needed a beer.
Twenty-eight years ago, in a book entitled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, I wrote: “The single most important marketing decision you can make is what to name the product.”
