Orange you glad this U.K. mobile company isn't called Pecan?

How France Telecom's Orange got its name.

Global telecom service provider Orange is square on purpose. That is, its logo is an orange square, so you don't confuse this Orange with the citrus fruit.

"We wouldn’t show fruit in our advertising, it’s about the color orange," says Daniel Keller, the France Telecom business's marketing manager (and one of a number of industry executives we interviewed recently about their companies' colorful names and brands.

The headline "Will Orange be a lemon?" -- which appeared in the U.K. newspaper The Observer in 1994 -- left a bad taste in Orange's mouth. "They didn’t take us very seriously then," Keller says.

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Global telecom service provider Orange is square on purpose. That is, its logo is an orange square, so you don't confuse this Orange with the citrus fruit.

"We wouldn’t show fruit in our advertising, it’s about the color orange," says Daniel Keller, the France Telecom business's marketing manager (and one of a number of industry executives we interviewed recently about their companies' colorful names and brands.

The headline "Will Orange be a lemon?" -- which appeared in the U.K. newspaper The Observer in 1994 -- left a bad taste in Orange's mouth. "They didn’t take us very seriously then," Keller says.

Orange started up in 1994, when "the mobile industry was a big technology-oriented market that was a niche for geeks…and rich people," The equipment was like "heavy big bricks and difficult to buy. The idea behind Orange was to make mobile communications a more intuitive, part of life."

Orange wanted to build its business as a company and service accessible to everyone, Keller says. "It’s a brand about people, not technology. Other companies at the time ended in com or tel," he says.

"We did a lot of research with a brand agency at that time and we looked at many names," Keller says. They said Orange was, "warm, optimistic, provided a sense of happiness, and seen as a positive color."

They liked it better than another considered name: Pecan.

At that time there really weren’t other companies with simple one word names, Keller says. "There was only Apple."

From a marketing perspective Orange primarily uses black and white in its marketing materials with orange as an accent color.

Still, sometimes it is hard for the company to get away from fruit references.

As Orange was rebranding service in the Ivory Coast an incumbent service provider tried to preempt the launch with an offering called "mango," Keller says. "They weren’t very successful. We now have 50% of the market [there]."

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