Tokyo, 1898–1899.

NEC began as a long name with a foreign partner. Its Japanese name, Nippon Denki Kabushiki gaisha and Wikipedia says the letters NEC are an acronym for Nippon Electric Company. The company is headquartered in the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, and Wikipedia describes it today as a seller of IT and network services, telecommunications equipment and software to businesses, carriers and government agencies.

The founding took two steps. Wikipedia says Kunihiko Iwadare and Takeshiro Maeda established Nippon Electric Limited Partnership on 31 August 1898, using facilities bought from the Miyoshi Electrical Manufacturing Company. Iwadare acted as the representative partner and Maeda handled sales. The American telephone maker Western Electric, which had an interest in the Japanese telephone market, was represented by Walter Tenney Carleton, who was also responsible for renovating the Miyoshi facilities. The partners agreed that the business would be reorganised as a joint-stock company once a treaty allowed it.

That moment came the following summer. Wikipedia says the revised treaty between Japan and the United States took effect on 17 July 1899, and that Nippon Electric Company, Limited was organised the same day with Western Electric as a joint venture with foreign capital. Iwadare was named managing director, and Iwadare, Maeda and Carleton handled the overall management. The company started with the production, sales and maintenance of telephones and switches, and modernised its production with the Mita Plant in Tokyo, begun in 1901 and completed in December 1902.

Iwadare also brought back ideas about management. In 1905, Wikipedia says, he visited Western Electric in the United States to study its management and production control. On his return he ended the “oyakata” system of sub-contracting and made managers and workers direct employees of the company, introduced new accounting and cost controls, and installed time clocks. In 1919 NEC began its association with Sumitomo, engaging a Sumitomo cable works to manufacture cables, and Wikipedia says NEC is a member of the Sumitomo Group today.

Three letters, a logo and two statements.

The short name took over from the long one in two stages. For decades the company traded in English as Nippon Electric Company, Limited, and Wikipedia records subsidiaries named in that style, such as Nippon Electric New York, incorporated in 1963 and now NEC America. In 1983, Wikipedia says, the company changed its English name to NEC Corporation, while the Japanese name stayed Nippon Denki.

The letters themselves were redrawn later. Wikipedia’s infobox shows the company’s logo with the caption “Logo since 1992”, so the current mark dates from 1992. Two years earlier, in 1990, the company had completed its new head office building in Shiba, Tokyo, known as the “Super Tower”, which still houses the headquarters. Wikipedia also says NEC introduced the idea of “C&C”, the integration of computers and communications, in the 1970s, and the initials appear in the names of the NEC C&C Research Laboratories opened in Germany in 1994.

Corporate statements followed. In a statement dated July 2015, which the telecoms news site TelecomTV republished, NEC said it had set out “Empowered by Innovation” as its corporate brand message in 2001, as an expression of its commitment to empowering people and society through continuous innovation. In June 2014, the company said, it had unveiled a new brand message for its Solutions for Society business, and in 2015 it made that message the corporate brand message, broadening its scope beyond a business brand.

The 2015 statement came with a graphic device. NEC said it would use the “Orchestrating Curve”, designed from the movement of a conductor’s baton, on its websites, advertisements, catalogues, business cards and other communication tools. The company described the curve as an expression of its wish to collaborate with customers, partners and other members of society.

Acronyms, statements and curves.

A corporate identity has a different job from a product brand. A product name speaks to the person holding the bottle or the device; a parent name speaks to investors, employees, suppliers and regulators, and it often has to stretch across trades that look nothing alike. A group that sells spirits and beer, or a maker whose catalogue runs from printers to ceramics, needs a name that does not tie it to a single shelf.

That is why parent names tend to fall into a few patterns. Some are contractions of an older, longer name, keeping the sound of a founding place or material while dropping the literal description. Some are the joined surnames of founders or the shortened names of two merged companies. Others are coined from scratch, built from fragments of words in another language so that they carry a mood rather than a meaning, and so that they can be registered as trademarks in many countries at once.

The visual system follows the same logic. A group mark is usually quieter than the marks it owns: a wordmark, a simple symbol, a restrained colour, designed to sit on an annual report, a factory sign and a business card without competing with the product names underneath.

From PC-98 to an alien family.

For consumers the three letters were carried by products. Wikipedia says NEC introduced the 8-bit PC-8800 series of personal computers in 1981 and the 16-bit PC-9800 series in 1982. In 1987 the company licensed technology from Hudson Soft to create a video game console, the PC Engine, which was released in North America in 1989 as the TurboGrafx-16.

The company later moved away from many of those businesses. Wikipedia says NEC Electronics was separated from NEC in 2002 as a semiconductor company, and merged with Renesas Technology on 1 April 2010 to form Renesas Electronics. On 27 January 2011 NEC formed a joint venture with the Chinese PC maker Lenovo, called Lenovo NEC Holdings.

Australia offers a dated example. The technology news site iTWire reported on 5 November 2005 that NEC Australia had launched an advertising campaign to reposition the NEC brand in that country. Created by the Melbourne agency Huzzard Byfield, it led with the Japanese telephone greeting “moshi moshi, say hello to NEC” and used a family of friendly aliens to invite consumers to engage with the brand. Huzzard Byfield’s creative director, Stewart Byfield, said the campaign had been designed to move away from the models and stylised product shots used in consumer electronics advertising. iTWire said it would run from November 2005 to March 2006 in business titles.

The Australian business kept working on its profile. iTWire reported on 7 July 2009 that NEC Australia had appointed the communications agency Loud as its advertising agency, describing the move as part of a renewed focus on marketing aimed at raising brand awareness among business and ICT audiences, while keeping n2n Communications for public relations and DWA for media.

For a design guide, NEC shows how a long corporate name can be reduced to three letters, given a redrawn logo and then extended with statements and a simple graphic curve. Compare Toshiba, another Tokyo electrical maker known by its wordmark, and Fujitsu, whose own name is a contraction of a longer one. For this guide we use blue, deep blue and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NEC’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.