David Placek is the founder and creative director of Lexicon Branding, a company that develops brand names. This collection gathers his own words from interviews. — Naming Lucid (and Beyond) with Lexicon Branding (Focus Lab).

Visual summary of operating lessons from David Placek.

Part 1: The Philosophy of Naming

  1. On the right name: David Placek: "Our mission is to create the right name for clients, because the right name does deliver asymmetric advantage and cumulative advantage for you." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  2. On the name outlasting everything else: David Placek: "Your brand name, whether it's a product name or a company name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  3. On how valuable a name can be: David Placek: "I'm going to emphasize one point, I think, which is that I really would like the listeners to really begin to think about how valuable a brand name can be." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  4. On personalities in names: David Placek: "We're coming back with names that have depth, and breadth, and have different experiences and personalities to them." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  5. On how architecture states: David Placek: "Look at a building, you behave differently towards a temple than you or a church versus a Holiday Inn in terms of how that architecture states." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  6. On naming for the marketplace: David Placek: "We're trying to name this for ourselves, and what we really should be doing is naming it for the marketplace and the customers." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  7. On lazy brains: David Placek: "We're told by a number of cognitive science that our brains are a little bit on the lazy side." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  8. On starting with behavior: David Placek: "In the first section of identify, it's really trying to find out from the client, let's talk about behavior." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  9. On what is new or different: David Placek: "Human psychology, humans only pay attention to what is new or what is different, I should say." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  10. On asking about fit to concept: David Placek: "If you're asking people is this fit to concept, you are inevitably always going to get a descriptive name." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).

Part 2: The Science of Sound and Linguistics

  1. On sound symbolism research: David Placek: "So we know through research that we funded, an extensive amount about an area in language called or linguistics called the sound symbolism." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  2. On Stanford linguistics: David Placek: "And over the years, we've had a very good relationship with Stanford University, with their Department of Linguistics." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  3. On the letter B: David Placek: "B, the sound of the letter B is one of the most reliable sounds in the English alphabet." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  4. On an engineering layer: David Placek: "And that work from that, we call it an engineering layer floats up into the creative teams." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  5. On compounds as multipliers: David Placek: "We know from the research we've invested in that compounds like Powerbook or Facebook are multipliers of associations because there's wind and there's circles around that, and then there's surf images around that." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  6. On palindromes: David Placek: "It's called a palindrome, which really means that you can flip it and it means the same thing." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  7. On noisy letters: David Placek: "And so with Sonos, by the way, we wanted things that are somewhat noisy." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  8. On compounds: David Placek: "It's interesting that when we present compounds to clients, we often get the comment, 'Well, it's a little bit long and it's a compound." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  9. On the letter V: David Placek: "They probably didn't know about V, but it's a perfect name for a car that's fast and has a big engine that roars." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  10. On linguists: David Placek: "We have employed, over four decades now, 253 linguists." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).

Part 3: Strategic Differentiation and Market Entry

  1. On leaning forward: David Placek: "And all of a sudden, people at least lean forward to consider it as opposed to rejecting it too fast." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  2. On not being descriptive: David Placek: "And you won't get an advantage if you're descriptive." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  3. On making the intangible tangible: David Placek: "So our rule here is if there's something that is intangible like that, we have to make it tangible." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  4. On strong signals in a busy world: David Placek: "And in a very busy competitive world, having a strong signal, which is generated by noise is a good thing." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  5. On SEO and AI: David Placek: "And now with AI, SEO is going to be less important." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  6. On spotting the AI trend: David Placek: "And when we saw this trend of that AI is going to take off, and it was an intuitive feeling on my part." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  7. On distinctiveness: David Placek: "So you want that name to stick in their mind to be distinctive, because distinctiveness is what creates that cumulative advantage." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  8. On standing out in a crowd of clouds: David Placek: "If you are Cloud Pro and there's 10 other cloud services, you're not going to stand out in the marketplace." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  9. On testing in Europe, Korea and America: David Placek: "And we interviewed consumers in Europe, South Korea, just picked out one country in Asia, and in America, and developers in those three." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  10. On buying a URL: David Placek: "The good news is because they're less valuable, you can typically buy a URL if you negotiate the right way and have time for 15, 20, 25, $30,000." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).

Part 4: The Creative Process and Methodology

  1. On comfort: David Placek: "Humans do like to be comfortable." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  2. On confidence to go bolder: David Placek: "Part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence going bigger and being uncomfortable." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  3. On not knowing it when you see it: David Placek: "Most clients, they come to a naming project absolutely believing with full confidence that they're going to know it when they see it, and the truth is it almost never happens." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  4. On the diamond exercise: David Placek: "At the top of the diamond is just the word win, and underneath that is how do we define winning for us as a company." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  5. On a long list of names: David Placek: "So in that list of 3,000 names is probably 250 potential diamonds that have to be fractured and examined." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  6. On inventing: David Placek: "And I use the word invent with intention because it's more than creative." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  7. On tension in a team: David Placek: "We look for tension in a team about arguing about these things, because we think that polarization is a sign of strength in the word." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  8. On software that helps generate names: David Placek: "And we'll probably get to this later, but we have software here that helps people generate names." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  9. On going bolder: David Placek: "And part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence that going bolder, and bigger, and being uncomfortable." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  10. On more than a one-hour exercise: David Placek: "And if you work at it, this is not a one-hour exercise, it may be an exercise repeated over the next 4 or 5 days." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).

Part 5: Lessons from Iconic Case Studies

  1. On Harry Potter’s rejections: David Placek: "I think Harry Potter was rejected 16 or 18 times, and Jack London's book even more than that." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  2. On working with Andy Grove: David Placek: "I always say this, I just was very fortunate to work with him on Pentium, and Xeon, and a few other things." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  3. On bidding for Sonos: David Placek: "But Sonos is something I'm so glad that I had this internal energy to, 'I got to go down there and make a bid for this.' I don't do that often, by the way, but I felt very strongly about Sonos." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  4. On Sonos being rejected: David Placek: "And so when we presented Sonos, which has many qualities to it, it was rejected because it doesn't have enough emotion to it." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  5. On the word azure: David Placek: "And along the way, we came up with this word azure, which is another word for blue." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  6. On a name for the documents: David Placek: "We just needed a name for the documents, and so we chose X.' And it's not a very good name." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  7. On water off a duck: David Placek: "At this point, after these four decades, it just rolls off my back like water off a duck is what my grandmother would say." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  8. On Windsurf and flow: David Placek: "And in this case with Windsurf, this is about flow about giving people that are coding something much more of a flow process, a smoother process, a more dynamic process." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  9. On curious and hardworking people: David Placek: "So, the fundamental quality is they're going to be curious and they're going to be hardworking." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).
  10. On a list of 300 names: David Placek: "So, it's relatively easy for anyone that works here to develop a list of 2 or 300 names over a 3 or 4-day period." — Lenny's Podcast: Naming expert David Placek (his turns).

Learn more:

  1. Naming Expert David Placek: Billion-Dollar Brand Names (Lenny's Newsletter)
  2. Naming Expert David Placek: Billion-Dollar Brand Names (Lenny's Newsletter)
  3. Naming Expert David Placek: Billion-Dollar Brand Names (Lenny's Newsletter)
  4. Naming Expert David Placek: Billion-Dollar Brand Names (Lenny's Newsletter)
  5. Naming Expert David Placek: Billion-Dollar Brand Names (Lenny's Newsletter)
  6. Naming Expert David Placek: Billion-Dollar Brand Names (Lenny's Newsletter)