The most iconic electric guitar in the world — the Fender Stratocaster — owes its name to two people. The first was Leo Fender, who founded the instrument-making company in 1946. The second was Don Randall, Fender’s long-time business partner, who in 1954 dubbed the company’s newly designed model the Stratocaster. Played by everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton, the “Strat” remains the chosen instrument of most of the world’s greatest guitarists. When Tony Blair was asked at the dawn of the new millennium to nominate his “symbol of the century”, he chose the Fender Stratocaster.

Born Donald Dean Randall in Kendrick, Idaho, in 1917, his family moved to California when he was 10. It was the age of radio, and the young Randall was not simply content to listen through the static, but became obsessed with understanding the technology and everything else about the new medium. By the age of 16 he had earned his ham radio operator’s licence, and soon afterwards built a portable amplifier and speaker system that he set up at local parties and dances around the Los Angeles area.

In his early 20s he took a job as a salesman for a wholesale radio supplier in Santa Ana, California. One of those he supplied was Leo Fender, who owned a radio shop in nearby Fullerton, and the two struck up a friendship.

On America’s entry into the Second World War in 1941, Randall was drafted into the US military, becoming communications chief of a pre-flight training school near Santa Ana. He also became an aviator himself, developing a lifelong passion that would later lead to the naming of the world’s best-known guitar.

On his discharge in 1946 he re-entered the radio business as the manager of the shop Radio-Tel, and signed an exclusive contract with Leo Fender to distribute his steel guitars and amplifiers. The business partnership flourished as new models were introduced, and in 1953 Randall became the president of Fender Sales.

With his background in radio and electronics, he provided significant technical input to the designs that Fender came up with for the company’s guitars and amplifiers. Even more vital though was his marketing expertise, which helped to transform a small Californian manufacturer into the worldwide market leader, as Fender guitars exploited and fuelled the development of rock’n’roll as the defining form of modern music.

One of Randall’s specific duties was to give names to the new guitar models coming off the Fender production line. Among the famous brand names he is credited with coining were the Broadcaster (named after his early passion for radio but changed soon afterwards to the Telecaster), the Esquire and the Precision Bass, as well as the most successful of them all, the Stratocaster.

On the news of his death, Tom Wheeler, the former editor of the American magazine Guitar Player and the author of histories of the Stratocaster and of the Fender company, credited Randall with playing a key role in making the electric guitar an iconic presence in popular culture.

“Don Randall re-imagined the way guitars were marketed,” Wheeler noted. “He recognised that guitar playing was more than an occupation or a pastime. It was a way of life, particularly for a new generation of young people.”

Randall also did much to popularise the guitar by persuading Fender in the mid-1950s to manufacture affordable instruments for beginners, which he named the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic guitars.

He was the lead negotiator in the sale of Fender to CBS in 1964, and became the vice president and general manager of the Fender division within CBS. In a move that was characteristic of his marketing acumen, the following year he organised a sales meeting with the Beatles, and persuaded John Lennon and George Harrison to use Fender guitars: Lennon used a Stratocaster for the first time on Help!, and Harrison played a Strat on the group’s 1965 album Rubber Soul. Randall left the company in 1969, and founded Randall Amplifiers.

He is survived by two sons and a daughter.

Don Randall, guitar industry pioneer, was born on October 30, 1917. He died on December 23, 2008, aged 91