Naming In The News

First Spark™: A New Brand Name Created for Best Buy®, By Strategic Name Development

Minneapolis, MN - Talk to any five-to-10 year old about the kind of laptop they’d like to own, and they’ll tell you they don’t want a toy, they want the real thing.

But when it comes to parents, the idea of releasing a real laptop to a five-year-old is analogous to letting them drive the family car. For parents, real laptops present real fears. Fears about security. Fears about spills and other keyboard accidents. Fears about inappropriate content.

After carefully listening to both generations, Best Buy developed a cutting edge line of kids computers that incorporates the safety features desired by parents with the laptop legitimacy required by children. The result is First Spark™, the first line of kids PCs with the right measure of fun and entertainment for children while meeting the computing needs and security concerns of their parents.

Strategic Name Development, Inc., a brand naming company, partnered with Best Buy to develop the First Spark name. “We were looking for an aspirational name that reinforced the ability to evoke the inquisitiveness and creativity of a child’s imagination.” said William Lozito, President of Strategic Name Development. He added, “It’s a name that sparks with kids, but resonates with parents too.”

The first laptop available in the First Spark kids PC line, available exclusively at Best Buy, was developed in partnership with Toshiba® and comes fully loaded with a suite of entertainment, education and monitoring software. As the initial release from First Spark, the Toshiba® laptop represents technology that is designed to spark imaginations while giving parents piece of mind.

A logical flanker to Best Buy’s Next Class™ line of laptops for older students, First Spark captures their attention and promotes further exploration of a world dominated by technology.

About Strategic Name Development, Inc., a brand naming company, has expertise in global product naming, company naming, tagline development, and brand architecture. We utilize our global capabilities while combining linguistics, creativity, and brand name research to build global brand names that are instantly recognizable, memorable, trademarkable, and strategically sound. We augment our naming expertise with our global proprietary Name DNA Validation^® research methodology, which compares name candidates to each other and against our proprietary normative database.

About Best Buy Co., Inc.

With operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, China, Mexico and Turkey, Best Buy is a multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products and services with a commitment to growth and innovation. The Best Buy family of brands and partnerships collectively generates more than $49 billion in annual revenue and includes brands such as Best Buy; Best Buy Mobile; Audiovisions; The Carphone Warehouse; Future Shop; Geek Squad, Jiangsu Five Star; Magnolia Audio Video; Napster; Pacific Sales; and The Phone House. Approximately 180,000 employees apply their talents to help bring the benefits of these brands to life for customers through retail locations, multiple call centers and Web sites, in-home solutions, product delivery and activities in our communities. Community partnership is central to the way we do business at Best Buy. In fiscal 2010, we donated a combined $25.2 million to improve the vitality of the communities where our employees and customers live and work. For more information about Best Buy, visit http://www.bestbuy.com/.

This press release was published courtesy of BusinessWire.