David Placek
David Placek is the founder of Lexicon Branding, a company that focuses exclusively on the development of brand names for competitive advantage. Lexicon is behind iconic names such as Sonos, Microsoft’s Azure, Windsurf, Vercel, Impossible Foods, BlackBerry, Intel’s Pentium, Apple’s PowerBook, and Swiffer. Over 40 years, David’s team has named nearly 4,000 brands and companies, employing over 250 linguists and pioneering naming innovation.
AI & Technology Skills
AI products benefit from tangible, natural names that counter consumer skepticism and technical abstraction.
"Engineers come to us wanting more sophisticated names where they are likely to end up with another Codium or an Anduril or an Anthropic... we think what you're doing needs to be much more tangible, an..."
Communication Skills
Stakeholders often have a false expectation that the right name will be immediately obvious and comfortable.
"Most clients... 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."
Internal disagreement and tension are often indicators of a strong, high-energy name.
"We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word."
Alignment should be focused on market success rather than internal executive preference.
"We really try to give that advice for it because it is about being successful in the marketplace. And so first of all, we try to separate the clients that we work with. We really want to work with cli..."
Marketing Skills
A brand name is the most permanent and frequently used element of a company's identity.
"Your brand name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, messaging will change, products will change, but that name is there."
Distinctive names provide an asymmetric advantage by standing out from descriptive competitors.
"Even before you launch this brand, why not start with an advantage in the marketplace? And you won't get an advantage if you're descriptive. If you are Cloud Pro and there's 10 other cloud services, y..."
A great name should initiate a narrative rather than just describing a function.
"You don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story. And Azure is going to behave differently in the marketplace than Cloud Pro, which is I think one of the names that we presented to t..."
Product Management Skills
A name is a tool for defining the future experience of a product, not just reflecting its current state.
"We really do have to help people think about, 'It's not about the past. You're actually creating the future.' And we really talk to people and emphasize the idea, 'This isn't a name you're creating. W..."
Effective naming requires mapping the existing linguistic and brand landscape to ensure differentiation.
"We call that developing a landscape. And we're looking for what are the words... What are the brand names, first, and then what language are they using in this space? Because we have to be distinctive..."
User research for names should focus on imagination and expectation rather than popularity or 'fit'.
"We do consumer research or customer research at that stage... putting the names in a series of drills... seeing how these names fire their imagination. And that's the most important thing in research,..."