Fast Company: Treat Your Brand Name Like Infrastructure

Most technology companies treat naming like marketing. In this Fast Company article, Lexicon founder David Placek argues it is something more fundemental. A name is infrastructure. When it works, no one notices. When it doesn’t, weak names force explanation. Explantation adds friction and friction slows adoption in ways that don’t show up on the balance sheet until too late. The article covers:

• How linguistic choices shape whether a technology feels accessible and trustworthy or opaque and out of reach.
• Why names like Vercel scale with the product.
• What makes the difference between a name that functions like infrastructure and one that functions like decoration.
• Why in an AI world, where prompts are commands and names are interfaces, getting language right is an informational imperative.

Once you see language this way, naming isn’t a craft. It’s infrastructure engineering.

Read the article in Fast Company.