Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding)

Your brand name, nothing's gonna be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, message will change, products will change, but that name is there. What's a name that you came up with that you have to fight super hard for that the client just hated? When we presented Sonos, it was rejected because it's not entertainment like. We argued about that because I said this is outside looking in, but I don't see you as an entertainment company. Humans do like to be comfortable. Part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence going bigger and being uncomfortable. There's a quote that I found of yours. If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet. We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word. Most clients they come to a naming project absolutely believing. With full confidence, that they're gonna know it when they s. It almost never happens. Most people listening to this are founders, a lot of PMs on product teams. Let's say they have a couple weeks. Gotta come up with a name. What should they do?

Today my guest is David Plasic. David is the founder of Lexicon Branding, which pioneer the field of brand naming and invented a few names that you may have heard of, including Powerbook. Pentium, Blackberry, Swiffer, the Impossible Burger, also Vercelle and Windsurf and Capcut and Azure. In our conversation, David opens up about the very specific process that he and his team go through to find winning names, including a simple exercise that you can do with you and your team to help you find the right name in just a few weeks. We also talk about why a great name is worth spending your time on, why you won't know a great name when you see it, and why you need to feel uncomfortable about the name first. Also, why big team brainstorms don't ever lead to great names, the stories behind names like Pentium and Sonos and Vercelle and Windsurf. Also, such interesting insights about the feeling and energy of every letter of the alphabet, and so much more, this episode is designed for anyone trying to figure out a name for their product or company, and also just for anyone that's interested in hearing the stories of how some of the most iconic names came to be.

If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become a paid subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of amazing products, including Bolt, Linear, superhuman, notion, perplexity, granola, and more. Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter.com and click bundle. With that

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.