Live on TBPN: Naming Strategy, ChatGPT’s Bad Habits & Rebrand Pitfalls

David Placek recently shared his insights on naming strategy live on TBPN with hosts Jordi Hays and John Coogan. They discussed the right time to work with Lexicon, the bad naming habits that ChatGPT is teaching you, our hot take on domains, the latest in “naming styles,” frameworks for growth stage companies, rebrand pitfalls to avoid and more…

Why This Conversation Matters

Whether you’re scaling a startup, planning a rebrand, or trying to make sense of generative AI’s impact on brand strategy, this episode cuts through the noise.

Listen Now

Tune in to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

TBPN: It’s a pleasure to have you. Is your 2026 off to a good start?

David Placek: It is. We’re very busy.

TBPN: It looks like it. Walk us through who you are, what you do, and what’s behind you.

David Placek: Well, I’m the president of Lexicon Branding, and we are in the business of developing brand names and naming systems for new companies and new technologies. We do it for clients all over the world. We have an interesting process that combines a creative layer with an engineering layer. That engineering layer is a combination of linguistics and cognitive science that puts more objectivity into both developing names and, importantly, selecting them. Every name on the wall behind me has been invented by Lexicon.

TBPN: Is the right time to meet a founder six months before they start the company? Because I imagine a lot of these companies come to you after they’ve started, after they’re already in market, and they realize for some reason or another that they need a new name. And then there are constraints and it becomes harder. Walk us through the ideal process.

David Placek: You’re absolutely right, most people do not come to us six months before they start the company. We suggest they come to us as they approach their Series A funding. By that point, they really know who they are and where they’re going, for the most part, so we can work with that information. Before that, sometimes they land on a great name. This is something you can get lucky with. Not everybody needs a Lexicon to work with. But most of the time, as you approach Series A is a good time to take a look at your name. We do that consulting all the time: hey, is it time for us to change our name?

TBPN: How do you handle the domain side? I angel in 60-some startups, maybe 70 at this point, and oftentimes they’ll have what seems like a great name, and maybe there are no trademark issues with it. But for some reason or another, the dot-com is taken and they will never get it, because it’s some 100-year-old company that’s been operational for long enough, or it’s a super rich person squatting on it. How do you navigate that? One part of the naming process that I appreciate is that you have these incredible constraints already. It’s not an open canvas. You have trademark constraints, domain constraints, and a bunch of other less clear constraints. In the naming process, you’re trying to combine all of those into a short list, and then it has to feel good and sound good.

David Placek: Well, the URL should be the least important constraint in this process. We have research we did several years ago, and just this morning we’re about to launch another study that I think is going to once again provide evidence that the URL is really no longer that important.

TBPN: Really? The domain brokers hate this one. I can’t wait to read the study, because it’s so counter to my view. I’ve always felt like domains are the element of your branding that you have the least amount of control over but have an incredible impact. If you see a beautiful website and then the domain is something like tryblank.io, it just screams. There’s so much subconscious branding people get every time they go to a big company’s website that has a dot-com. It trains people. What’s the data that shows it doesn’t really matter?

David Placek: Given what the two of you do, it’s probably a little inside baseball, because we’re not finding that on the consumer or customer end. They’re just looking at this as an address. The analog is a zip code. We actually found evidence that consumers like the idea of something that says, what is this? Look at the companies that have done well. Lucid is a client of ours, Lucid Motors. They don’t have lucid.com. So I think it’s less important for the consumer and the customer than it is perhaps considered to be.

TBPN: Part of it for me, as somebody who has helped name a number of companies, is that I enjoy buying and finding domains. I’ve always appreciated how hard it is to get a great domain. When a founder comes and pitches me and they already have something great, it shows a level of agency and ability. Maybe they didn’t know a great broker, or maybe they didn’t even use a broker, but they figured out how to get it. It says something about them. But I agree, there’s a lot of context where it totally doesn’t matter. If you look at the wall back there, almost every single one of those companies got to the point where they could buy whatever domain they wanted.

David Placek: Yeah. The Microsoft Azure one is funny, because Microsoft owns azure.com but reroutes it to azure.microsoft.com because they want you at the top-level domain.

TBPN: How has ChatGPT maybe given some clients the wrong lesson in branding? Traditionally, if somebody came to you and said, I’m going to try to make a consumer product, I want to get to a billion users, and I’m going to use ChatGPT, what do you think? You’d probably laugh them out of the room, or say, you really need to work with me.

David Placek: The interesting thing about that question is that more than 50% of our clients come to us having worked with Claude or ChatGPT to develop their names. They find it frustrating that things just don’t work together. There’s no doubt those types of models can generate thousands of names. What they can’t do at this moment in time, that may change down the road, is apply the judgment and principles around this name being better than that name for you.

Our philosophy is, we’re not in this business to create good names. We’re in the business to create the right name. The right name that adds immediate value and long-term value. The name should be the one thing that stays with you through your whole journey. Nothing will be used more often or longer than your name. That makes it very important. And, at this point in time, a Chat or a Claude just isn’t up to speed to do that kind of decision making.

TBPN: Walk us through the chapters of naming styles. We’re at an interesting moment right now. People are putting GPT on the end of things. People are saying “the blank company of place.” That’s a whole new thing.

TBPN: Yeah, The Browser Company of New York. A bunch of people copied that. My take was that it was an amazing name one time because it signaled to insiders in Silicon Valley that it was a fresh take on the browser. It was the polar opposite of Chrome or Safari, these one-word names, even though they did also have a name for the product. Then you can think back to an era where adding “ly” to the end of something was popular. What are the different chapters? I’m curious, because the great brands have always kind of gone against the mold, right?

David Placek: Sure. One of the most persistent trends, or chapters as you call it, in the industry is imitation. Someone comes out with something that ends in “ly,” and hey, that’s a good idea, let’s do it. Then you’ll see four or five names in the marketplace that end with “ly.” What’s happening there is that imitation doesn’t generate the interest and the provocativeness that a really well-put-together brand name can. So, we always advise people: imitation is suicide. Your name should not look or act like anything that’s out there in the marketplace.

TBPN: How’d you get into this? What was the first brand name you did?

David Placek: I came from the advertising business, a great agency, Foote, Cone & Belding. I saw as we worked on projects and company identity that naming was going to become more and more important as the world got more complex and more integrated. So, I took a flyer. That’s the simple, maybe boring story of how I got into this business. As for the first name we ever generated, it’s a name that has long since disappeared. I think it was for United Technologies, and we named a new furnace noise reduction technology called Whisper.

TBPN: What advice do you give companies that get to a scale where they have a brand name and then different product lines and maybe even subcompanies? We’re at this point right now where, look at a company like Claude has Anthropic, Claude, Claude Code. OpenAI has ChatGPT, they have the browser, which I’m blanking on the name of. They have Codex, they have different models, and Codex, there’s GPT-5. What framework do you give? I’m assuming you’ll work with a company to name the parent company and also the subproducts, and in some cases the subproducts end up outshining the parent company.

David Placek: We have an expression here: clarity is the language of leadership. What you see in the example you just gave me, there’s really no story there. They don’t have a common language, so it’s difficult for the audience, the consumers, to really understand what they’re doing for me and what this company is about. It’s a very choppy thing. We have clients coming to us and asking us to help them, to use the term, “straighten out” their brand language and make it make sense.

TBPN: Creating a through line.

David Placek: Yes.

TBPN: What else about these taxonomies? At the early-stage Series A, how much are you trying to actually define a hierarchy of product names? And what is the process of working with you like? Is there a specific sprint, specific deadlines? Are you paying up front and you don’t know what you’re getting? Is there contingency? What is the workflow to work with the company?

David Placek: It’s pretty straightforward. In many ways this isn’t really rocket science. We start with a simple work session where we ask clients four key questions. This always works. It’s: how do you define winning? If we get 10 people in a room we’re going to get 10 different answers, but we can sort that out. Then we say, okay, if that’s how you want to win, what do you have to win? That gives us things the name doesn’t have to do. Then we say, okay, what do you need to win? What don’t you have? That begins to give us information about how the name might help them, because a name should be a tool. It should be the foundation for success. And then finally we say, what do you have to say? What would you like to say? Between those four things, we call it a diamond framework, we can then set up what we call a creative framework. We don’t even use the word objective, because we want a window we can travel through and do a lot of creative work. That’s where the process begins. Then we work here with small two-person creative teams, and we have what we call internally a related engineering layer where linguists use company-funded research on things like, it sounds exotic but it’s very fundamental, sound symbolism, letter structure, and fluency. All those things then go into a funnel to help us select names.

TBPN: Makes sense. What is the key to avoiding botching a rebrand? Nowadays products grow so quickly. We saw this with ClawdBot, which, if you paid attention to that, you would have seen, okay, Anthropic is going to have an issue with this, way too in the same category, sounds the exact same, very confusing to consumers. So they quickly rebranded it, then didn’t like the rebrand, then rebranded it again. Fortunately, I think the product is exciting enough that the new name, OpenClaw, hopefully sticks, and the community keeps the momentum. But you’re working with companies that come to you when they’re starting to get real traction and know they need to change their name, but they don’t want to destroy the brand equity they’ve built up.

David Placek: I think the biggest factor is that they under-invest in name change. I don’t necessarily mean investing with a Lexicon or someone else. They don’t sit and think through all the implications of doing this. First, what’s the message that we want to communicate, because at some point you do have to say, yesterday we were this and today we’re that. What is that message? The second thing is lining up the resources, the right law firm, global language analysis, all these things, so you don’t end up with something that’s launched and then turns out to mean, you know, your mother’s a bank robber. Just not a fun day.

TBPN: A good example, you did TripActions to Navan. TripActions had a big brand, at least in the US, and they didn’t want to be explicitly known, I imagine, as just a travel booking site. They had to go through that. I remember they really paired the rebrand, they worked with you guys, but then they also seemingly spent five or ten million dollars in a short period of time to reintroduce themselves. At least that was my impression as somebody in the target market.

David Placek: They did a fantastic job. That name is a coined solution. We made it up, because the founder of the company, having been, you might say, burned by TripActions being so one-dimensional, so narrow, said, I want flexibility for the future. The best way to get flexibility is to make something up.

TBPN: So that means we’ll never run out of names.

David Placek: That’s right.

TBPN: Every single time I’ve been working with a startup or trying to name something, you can be hitting a wall where you’re like, I can’t find any domains in this space that I like. Everything’s trademarked. And then there’s always a name. You might appreciate some of the history of TBPN. We started as a show called Technology Brothers. Then everywhere we went, people would say, introducing the tech bros. We knew this was our life’s work, and I didn’t want to spend my whole life being introduced as the tech bros, which was the word we were trying to avoid in the original name. So I was like, I need a four or five letter domain. It has to have TB in it. We ended up at TBPN. We’re not a network. We look and sound like an ESPN. But the logic was, if we name it like a network, even though we’re a podcast or a livestream, the comms departments for big tech companies will be more comfortable putting their leadership teams on our show because it looks and feels more like television. Even if at the end of the day it is just ten of us here in a studio making something that looks like television.

David Placek: It does feel like you’re a national network.

TBPN: Yeah, it is a mouthful, though. We’re having to power through that.

David Placek: Yes, putting a P next to a B is always a choice.

TBPN: Last question for me, because there’s some breaking news going on right now. What do you think about a return to using surnames as company names? The Ford Motor Company, Walt Disney, the Disney Company. That felt like something that was just right there on the shelf for founders to pull off and revive. It’s starting to happen. Do you think that’s something that might happen? There’s Rigetti Computing, a quantum computing company, public. Some people have done it. Do you think that’s something you would caution folks against, or you’d be in favor of?

David Placek: I would caution to really take a hard look at that. It depends on the person’s personality, what the name is like, is it easy to spell, is it easy to say? The danger, of course, is that something happens to the founder that is untoward. Now you have to live with that. So I think it’s worth discussion and evaluation, but I would probably push against it most of the time.

TBPN: How many clients do you work with a year, roughly?

TBPN: We’ll do about 75 projects a year in the naming area, and then we have a research group here that does quantitative research for us also.

TBPN: Very cool. And only some fraction of those are technology companies. I’m assuming a bunch of other industries tap your expertise as well.

David Placek: Yeah, we try to keep a balance, but really 50, maybe 60% of our work is in technology at this point in time, which I love. Everything is technology. We see the future every week.

TBPN: Yeah, and we talk to some of the smartest people you can imagine.

David Placek: As you guys, yeah.

TBPN: Well, I’ve had a couple people text me during the show asking for an intro, so you have quite a lot of demand, I’m sure, more than you can fulfill. But we’ll definitely send some people your way, and it was great to meet.

David Placek: Thanks so much.