Marketing Against The Grain: What’s in a name? Billions apparently

Proctor and Gamble hired Lexicon to name a stringless mop. Lexicon came back with Swiffer. A few years later Clorox launched a nearly identical product and called it ReadyMop. Today ReadyMop is worth roughtly $200 million and Swiffer is a $5billion brand. Marketing Against The Grain put that comparison in front of marketers this week. ReadyMop tells you what the product does. Swiffer makes you feel something. The difference between a good name and a great name can be billions.

The takeways:

• A name is your first (and cheapest) marketing investment. Before you spend on ads or content, your name is already doing work — or it isn’t. Treat it like a strategic asset, not an afterthought.
• Describe the feeling, not the function. ReadyMop tells you what it does, but Swiffer makes you feel something (also, it’s more fun to say out loud). The best brand names evoke an emotion or idea rather than explain a product.
• The name compounds over time. A great name gets more valuable the longer it’s in market. That’s leverage you can’t buy retroactively — which is why it’s worth getting right at the start.

Read the whole feature here.

Marketing Against The Grain: Friday Feature

In 1998, a team of tech executives sat in front of David Placek, arms crossed, unconvinced.

They were inside a windowless vault — the conference room of Placek’s Sausalito office that once housed naval maps. He was presenting names for a new device, a pager that would send email messages back and forth.

They’d asked Placek and his firm, Lexicon Branding, to go in two directions. The safe play included names like ProMail, EasyMail, DynaMail. The more imaginative name his team had dreamed up was BlackBerry.

The executives looked confused, dismissive even. They said it was crazy.

Placek explained that they’d interviewed people taking the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, and their response to the prospect of email had been the same: stress. The name needed to evoke joy.

Research in six languages had also determined that B is one of the most reliable sounds in English, that “black” is recognizable across multiple languages, and that a blackberry brings an element of delight.

There was one more thing, he told them: “Your current competitors would never have the courage to put BlackBerry on a device.”

They had liftoff.

Why BlackBerry beat ProMail

Placek has been in the name game a long time. He’s the brain behind Swiffer, Subaru’s Outback, Microsoft’s Azure, and Apple’s PowerBook. Lexicon Branding has named nearly 4,000 products and businesses worth billions of dollars.

His philosophies are underpinned by sound symbolism — the way letters and sounds trigger psychological responses in the brain. The letter “V” (as in Corvette) signals vibrance and vivacity. “X” (like SpaceX) indicates innovation. Names built from compound words offer multiplying associations. Names with repetitive phonetic sounds, like Sonos or KitKat, are viewed more favorably.

To Placek, a name isn’t just a word. It’s a poem — a series of sensations firing in a listener’s brain before a single dollar has been spent on marketing. “It should act as your most original and distinctive piece of marketing,” he says.

The right name inspires imagination and trust, communicates an idea rather than describing a product, and is accessible enough to be spoken, typed, searched, and remembered.

“Consumers don’t look at a brand name on a shelf and start picking the word apart,” he says. “They start imagining what it means and what it is for them.”

Finding that name is like sifting for gold. Lexicon starts with Greek and Latin roots, mythological references, palindromes, the periodic table. The firm’s databases — organized by principals like “small things” and protected like a walled garden — sound like Willy Wonka’s factory for word nerds. When Placek hits a slump, he buys aeronautics magazines, reads Aristotle, takes a walk.

“You can’t sit at your desk and just strain,” he says.

2,000 names, one winner

The process is rigorous. Teams of two generate names from opposite vantage points — one working for the client, one playing competitor, one working on a completely unrelated product. They produce 2,000 names before whittling to a shortlist of 50 to 100. A network of 105 linguists across 78 countries vets each for cultural relevance and political implication.

The stakes are real. When Procter & Gamble hired Lexicon to name a new stringless mop, the team considered words like sweep, swipe, and swift before landing on Swiffer — a name that danced around the fact that nobody likes to mop. A few years later, Clorox launched a nearly identical product and called it ReadyMop. Today, ReadyMop is worth roughly $200 million. Swiffer is a $5 billion brand.

“ReadyMop is comfortable, it’s acceptable,” Placek says. “But it’s not a tool.”

The difference between a good name and a great one, it turns out, can be worth billions.

The Takeaways

A name is your first (and cheapest) marketing investment. Before you spend on ads or content, your name is already doing work — or it isn’t. Treat it like a strategic asset, not an afterthought.

Describe the feeling, not the function. ReadyMop tells you what it does, but Swiffer makes you feel something (also, it’s more fun to say out loud). The best brand names evoke an emotion or idea rather than explain a product.

The name compounds over time. A great name gets more valuable the longer it’s in market. That’s leverage you can’t buy retroactively — which is why it’s worth getting right at the start.

Original article published in the Hustle by Katherine Laidlaw.