San Francisco Chronicle: This is the Bay Area man naming your favorite things — from the BlackBerry to faux meat
Lexicon Press Coverage
Ever wonder how your favorite household brands got their names? Carylon Said from the San Francisco Chronicle sat down with our Founder and Creative Director, David Placek, to discuss Lexicon’s winning naming approach and its history of developing iconic brand names.
This is the Bay Area man naming your favorite things — from the BlackBerry to faux meat
Published San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2023
They are brand names so familiar — and so iconic — that it feels as if they’ve always been woven into our cultural landscape.
Apple’s PowerBook laptop. Intel’s Pentium microprocessor. BlackBerry phones. Sonos sound systems. P&G’s Swiffer and Febreze cleaning products. Impossible Foods’ faux meat. Coca-Cola’s Dasani water. Subaru’s Outback and Forester SUVs. GM’s OnStar driver assistance. Embassy Suites hotels.
All were coined by a small Sausalito (San Francisco Bay Area) company, Lexicon Branding, which also helped pioneer the field of brand naming — devising distinctive, memorable monikers to serve as a prism for helping people understand company and product identities.
“Four decades back, I had the insight that brand names were becoming more important as the world was becoming more interconnected, languages beyond English were becoming more important, and economies in many countries were growing at a rapid pace,” said David Placek, Lexicon CEO and founder. “I decided there might be an opportunity here. No one had integrated this idea of developing brand names and brand architectures into a suite of services.”
With a background in politics (as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill) and advertising (six years at San Francisco’s Foote, Cone & Belding), he started Lexicon in 1982, bootstrapping it with his own savings. It’s still privately held, with 18 full-time employees, six part-timers and a worldwide network of on-call linguists. But its size belies the thousands of names it’s devised.
Brands Lexicon has worked with are displayed in a conference room at the Lexicon office in Sausalito.
“Dave is an iconic figure in the naming space,” said Rob Meyerson, a brand consultant and author of the book “Brand Naming.” “Lexicon is the 800-pound gorilla in this very small world of bespoke naming agencies that just focus on naming. They keep nailing it, again and again.”
Now, in a world where AI can write entire books, not to mention term papers, blogs, slogans, lyrics and, yes, names, the field of naming could be disrupted. Lexicon has begun to experiment with what AI can do, but Placek thinks the human touch will always be integral.
“If you ask for a new name for a new wine, it might take ‘grape’ and ‘leaf’ and (devise) ‘Bold Leaf Cabernet,’ but it can’t do something smooth, seamless and distinct,” he said of artificial intelligence.
Search engine optimization has become an increasingly important part of the process.
“When you’re digital, you’re instantly global,” Placek said. “We do more legal clearance than ever before, and have expanded our network of linguists around the world to 110 in 70 countries.”
Lexicon has also invested heavily in understanding language acquisition and sound symbolism (the resemblance between sound and meaning).
Companies are well-aware of how crucial names are.
“Our name is the gateway to our brand experience,” said Noah Spring, vice president of branding and creative at Pennsylvania pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen. As he admitted, that name, the result of a long-ago corporate merger, “is a handful, a mouthful and an earful. If you had to type my email address every day, you would cry.”
So the Fortune 10 company turned to Lexicon for a new moniker.
“We needed a name that could travel across 21 languages and cultures, be unique enough to be memorable, and generate enthusiasm among our 44,000 employees,” Spring said. “It’s a puzzle that needed to be solved.”
Over a rigorous six- to eight-month process, Lexicon generated a number of names and AmerisourceBergen vetted them. Spring declined to say what it paid. Lexicon said its prices start around $50,000.
The winner: Cencora, which combines aspects of “cent” (for 100) and “core.” Besides its English meaning, “core” references the Latin word for heart.
“It’s a neologism,” Spring said, referring to Cencora’s identity as a new word. “There’s just enough meaning in the name to make it intriguing and to give it meaning in a number of different languages.”
The PowerBook, introduced in 1991, put Lexicon on the map, legitimizing its value, Placek said.
Lexicon approached that assignment for Apple as it still does: viewing prototypes of the product, holding brainstorming sessions, researching consumers’ views.
When Lexicon devised “Pentium” for Intel’s chips, it was the industry’s first branded microprocessor. “It was about making people aware that what was on the inside of the computer should be part of the decision-making process,” Placek said.
Seeking a word that was elemental or foundational, his team went through the periodic table. Eventually it took the suffix from sodium, titanium, uranium and welded it with “pent,” underscoring that the chips were Intel’s fifth generation.
When a small Canadian company approached Lexicon in 1998 needing a name for its new phone — among the first to handle email and secure messages — its engineers suggested prosaic names like EasyMail and ProMail.
“We said, ‘You’re so small, but you’ve got something absolutely game changing here — you’ve got to tell the world you are not like the rest,’” Placek said. “We brought them this word ‘BlackBerry’ and they looked at us like we were a little bit off.
“We explained, ‘Your competitors, the big ones, would never have the courage to use this name. Your device is black. ‘B’ is one of the most reliable sounds in the English alphabet. There’s alliteration between the two B’s.” Show a picture of blackberry fruit as your logo and everybody will get it.’”
BlackBerry — its rabid fans nicknamed it CrackBerry — became a global sensation.
Swiffer was another product that established a whole new category.
“P&G came to us with the idea of a mop,” Placek said. “They had registered a trademark with a name like ‘ProMop,’ very logical, very rational. But when we got a conceptual model it was clear that it wasn’t really a mop; it was a new household cleaning device.”
The team decided to jettison the word “mop.” After interviewing consumers who universally disliked mopping, “We said to P&G, ‘This is an unpleasant, joyless task. Let’s create something that (shows that this) uplifts us, saves time, is effective, but has joy in it.”
The linguistics team analyzed sounds and words related to cleaning like sweep, wipe, vacuum and dishrags. “ ‘Sweep’ was one of the most efficient sounds, so we drilled down on that,” Placek said. “We began to scramble letters, and the first thing to come was the word ‘swift.’ It wasn’t distinctive enough so we added ‘er’ for more energy.”
When it comes to naming opportunities in his personal life, Placek hasn’t made waves. His grown children are Brenna and Kennedy. His cockapoo is Scout. “There are thousands with that name in California alone,” he said ruefully.
As for his grandchildren? “Did my kids ask me for naming advice?” he said. “They did not!”
April 1, 2023