General Electric, General Mills, and General Motors: Why did so many legacy companies choose the word "general"?

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James LaPointe asks:

I have always wondered about companies that include “general” in their name. Listed below are several well known companies that have been in existence for over a century: General Mills, General Electric, General Foods, General Dynamics, and General Motors. Was the inclusion of “general” synonymous with the era when they were formed?

The modern business landscape often prizes wacky, unusual names and will accept — even embrace — misspellings. Think Google, Crumbl Cookies and Poppi. But in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, it was actually a virtue to be as plain as possible.

Marketplace spoke to U.S. business historians and economists who, overall, say they're not aware of why exactly companies like General Mills and General Electric chose the word "general."

But they offered several theories for why they may have chosen the term. The naming convention simply could've become the norm for major corporations who wanted to shake off their regional identities after a merger. Companies could have also chosen general terms because they wanted to distance themselves from their rich owners at a time when there were extreme wealth disparities in America. Or they may have wanted to signal how much potential the company had.

Merger madness

Jennifer Black, a historian, said she thinks the term wasn't a "deliberate branding choice," but a cultural trope that arose out of the merger movement in the 1890s.

"In the 1890s, you really see a consolidation of companies in the United States, with several mergers happening across the board," said Black, who's a professor at Misericordia University and the author of the book "Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America."

It occurred in a variety of industries, but many of these mergers were happening in "corporate, consumer-oriented industries," Black explained.

In 1892, General Electric formed out of a merger between Edison General Electric Company and Thomas-Houston Electric Company. In 1908, the businessman William Durant created General Motors as a holding company that included Buick and Oldsmobile. In 1928, the Washburn-Crosby Company merged with regional milling companies to become General Mills. In 1929, Postum Cereal Company acquired the frozen food company Birdseye and was renamed to General Foods. And in 1952, General Dynamics was formed out of a merger between the aircraft manufacturer Canadair and the Electric Boat Company.

When regional companies — often named after their owners — merge with larger companies, the new companies let go of these regional identities in favor of names that feel more national or universal, like General Mills, American Milling Company and the National Biscuit Company, Black said.

"It is possible that the other companies decided to follow suit because they wanted to grift the goodwill of GE, but it is also possible that they were just following a perceived cultural or business norm," Black said.

Rejecting the “robber barons” of the Gilded Age

After a merger, selecting the term "general" could have also allowed these companies to start fresh without having to worry about the founder's reputation sullying the brand.

"Choosing the name 'general' for your company does abstract it a bit, removing the image of the singular owner, the mean old robber baron, from the public eye. This would allow an ad campaign to fill in the blanks by constructing a new image of the company, allowing them to build goodwill with the public," Black said.

The character of the robber baron applied to major business owners at the time, like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, J.P. Morgan and Jay Gould, Black said.

One of the reasons why the wealthiest elites got the moniker of "robber baron" is because this was a period when they were able to accumulate extreme wealth, while many people were living in extreme poverty, Black said.

"They were robbing 'the working class' of their wages by focusing on the accumulation of wealth and by focusing on efficiency rather than the rights of laborers," Black said.

During this time, you see the rise of tenements, which are "very cramped, unsanitary living spaces," Black said.

"You might have multiple families sharing a single room, for example, and everybody in the family has to go out and earn an income to contribute because there are very few resources," Black said.

Many people were also working 14- to 16-hour shifts, sometimes six days a week, with few breaks, Black added.

In his book "Creating the Corporate Soul," the historian Roland Marchand delves into how corporations in the 20th century aimed to craft a friendlier, more palatable image for the public.

"Marchand talks about how corporations engaged in public relations campaigns to try to stave off public criticism of their goliath-like power in this period," Black said.

So if you applied Marchand's line of thinking, choosing the word "general" would give companies like General Electric more freedom to craft their public image the way they wanted, Black said.

"I think there is an attempt to let go of those older identities so they can start fresh," Black said. "It allowed them a certain anonymity, if you will, a blank slate that they could then use to rebuild or establish new goodwill and trust with the public that wasn't associated with the negative views of singular owners at the time."

An unlimited future

Because the term "general" is so flexible, other experts say that it could have allowed companies to dabble in other businesses or develop products without getting pigeonholed.

"As a firm develops, it develops different capabilities, and it could apply those capabilities without changing its name," said Louis Galambos, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Take General Motors, which eventually sold different types of vehicles to the public.

"General Motors did not just produce cars; they were going to produce trucks too. And so it opened up that whole future," Galambos said.

Richard Langlois, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, also thinks the term could have been chosen to indicate a company's capabilities (along with its size).

"When you're selling a product, you're not just selling the thing. You're selling a whole bundle of attributes," Langlois said. "You don't want to call your company Fly by Night Auto."

There are some cases where companies would choose generic names that actually had a clear meaning, like Standard Oil.

"That actually meant something. In the beginning, Standard’s main product was kerosene for heating and lighting, replacing whale oil and other more expensive things. But the quality and container size varied greatly among refiners and even within the products of refiners," Langlois said. "Standard Oil wanted to signal that they had standardized kerosene, and that you would know what you were getting with their product."

When “general” becomes too generic

Eventually, the inclusion of the word "general" in company names went out of vogue, partly due to legal reasons, Black said.

The Lanham Act, passed in 1946, stated that generic terms are not eligible for trademark protection. There were also earlier legal cases that set precedents basically saying you can't adopt a generic name for your brand, Black said.

Attitudes toward generic names also changed over time.

"Culturally, we don't respect those universal monikers the way that Americans did around the turn of the 20th century," Black said.

And having too generic of a name can also be detrimental to your business.

"If you want to build a brand, you need to be able to have a unique name for your brand that is going to set your company or your product apart from competitors, and so it would not be advantageous for you to name your brand Standard Facial Tissue," Black said.

General Electric and General Motors still have names with cachet, but they've spent the past century building their brands, Black said.

"They're perhaps exceptions now to a rule where they might have been the rule before," Black said.