YouSaid · the spoken record

David Placek

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-06-29
most recent: 2025-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is a good example. So in technology, there are some things that someone hands you a new phone and you look at and it's tangible and it's got a shape and color, things like that, easier to name. But the name of Windsorf before it was Windsurf was codium, right? And so it's all about a type of code or a process for coding.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, the ideal link is pretty short. It's eight weeks for larger corporate projects where you have boards and a little more politicking to do and a few more presentations. It's a three-month turn. And sometimes by the time they approve things and clear it, it's a four month process.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's relatively easy for anyone that works here to develop a list of two or three hundred names over a three or four day period. Where do we find these people? More who are writers from newspaper reporters because they have to work fast, their stories get rejected. People who might have written a novel. We have hired people from agencies over the years. They work a little less effectively than others who have a speech writer in I wrote speeches in Washington, D.C. Those people have to work hard, crank out a lot of material, get rejected candidates says, I don't like this, start over. Those are more resilient people. That's where they come from. It's not easy to find these people. It really isn't.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That just won't, those names will not, there's not enough in that list to clear through our screens, legal screens or linguistic screens. And remember, we start with a creative framework and criteria that the names need to meet. So we're looking for people who can churn out a lot of work. And when that's rejected, they just keep going. We look for tenacious people. Now we have, and we'll probably get to this later, but we have software here that helps people generate names, not really maybe five years down the road, it'll actually spit out solutions, but now it's helping us to generate ideas and directions. And sound symbolism ideas. Word unit prefix.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the fundamental quality is they're going to be curious and they're going to be hardworking. This is, and hopefully, and this is hard to screen poor, but lower egos. This is unlike the advertising business, which I came from, right? So six years in a large agency, where a creative person or a copywriter can think about something and come in with three or four alternatives, right, in terms of a headline or body copy. And that might be refined a little bit and maybe sent back to the drawing boards altogether. But it's a relatively simple process, right? And no disrespect intended there. Here, I can't just sit down and say, okay, well, we're naming a new car here. I'm going to generate 100 names and you generate 100 names and something will fall out.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll do this twice with most assignments. Sometimes we'll do just one time depending on timing and budget. But we really try to get two cycles here, partly because humans love to compare, right? If you're looking for a house, you don't just look at the first house and say, okay, let's sign us up. You look and you learn that we don't need a swimming pool, but we do need a view. It's the same with names. And so we get feedback from our clients. And sometimes as a co-creative process where a client will come up with a word or a solution and will then run that through our screening mechanisms for them. And that's really the process. And the final phase is implementing.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say ideas because they're not all solutions, they're not all workable. They may be just beginning ideas, concepts. And we sift through those. And now one of the major challenges that we face and certainly our clients face is the need to clear a trademark for it to be not in conflict with a marketplace that is we're almost reaching a tipping point in terms of difficulty of clearing names here. And so we have paralegals here and we have a trademark attorney and we'll analyze those names. That gets us to a small, much smaller set. And then we'll do our linguistic work with our linguists and we end up with a set of names to show our clients.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the sounds of aliveness? And so with Sonos, by the way, we wanted things that are somewhat noisy, right? And so S is a noisy letter, like a Z or even a V. And so you begin to set priorities about what letters we're going to use. And that work from that, we call it an engineering layer sort of floats up into the creative teams. And so it's a mixture of things at a certain point in time. All right. Now what happens to all that at a certain point, usually three to four weeks into this, we might have two or three thousand.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have employed over four decades now, 253 linguists, most of them PhDs, some of them contracts, some of them actual employees. Well, that's a lot of intellectual knowledge. So we really have what I call a linguistic engine here. And then we now have an operating network of I just checked on this figure yesterday. We have 108 linguists in 76 countries that help us. Some of them do creative work. others will do just the analysis of names for us. So now we have that creative framework. We have creative teams working on this. Now we're tapping into databases that have over 18,000 small word units, technically called morphemes. And so we also can tap in from a sound standpoint. What are the sounds of reliability?”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been research on that over the years, but there were some gaps, and we decided to fill this. And over the years, we've had a very good relationship with Stanford University, with their department of linguistics. We've hired linguists from MIT, from Berkeley. We have a linguistic internship here. I actually just ran this number preparing for this discussion.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the process at some point I will hopefully write either a good article on this or maybe even a book, but this process would work for, I think, a lot of things. I know it would. All right. Now, what's that second layer that I talked about? Well, we have made significant investments in this area of linguistics and cognitive science. And it's in two ways. One, building proprietary knowledge. So we know Through research that we funded an extensive amount about an area in language called or linguistics called sound symbolism. So what are the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet? And what do they do? How do they evoke things? Well, it turns out that each of those letters sends out a signal that creates a certain sort of vibration, if you will, or experience. Now,”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really working for us, that actually the names were coming from employees and from small groups. And so we've moved our process to at least two or three small teams of two people. And each of those teams, so let's say we, you know, on significant projects, we always use three teams. And each team gets a different briefing. One team knows everything about the project, but the other teams don't. We'll replace if we're working for Microsoft, the second team thinks they're working for Apple. I mean, they know it's disguised. We're trying to do is open up the coffers of creativity for this. And so when people are working on what they know is not the real assignment, they are now free to make all kinds of mistakes. And so most of our names have come out of the second or third team because.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's the result of millions of dollars of R&D on our part. So the first thing is no surprise to anyone. We work with creative individuals. And we don't use, this will be contrary and we don't use large brainstorming sessions. I did when I first started the company. I used freelancers. I used Bard's brainstorming groups. And along the way through some analysis, we really discovered that that was not.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the president of PNG 50 years ago or something like that. So that's that first phase, which allows us to create what we call a creative framework. And we don't even use the word objectives here because that gets too logical. We actually framework for us as a metaphor for a window for us and our teams and our linguists to travel through to kind of open things up so that we're not coming back with a narrow list of names. We're coming back with names that have depth and breadth and have different experiences and personalities to them. And clients will sign off on that. And then we get going. So now we're moved to the event stage. And in the event stage, we do really two things. You can look at this as, you know, two layers of our process. And I think the second layer is probably what makes us quite unique in the market.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like Dasani has a lot of rhythm to it, right? It's kind of calming. And so we'll begin to extract things from that discussion on experience. We will then also, as part of this first phase, look at the competition. We call that developing a landscape. And we're looking for what are the words, you know, the what are the brand names first and then what language are they using in this space? So because we want to be, we have to be distinctive. If a brand name isn't distinctive, you lose, right? Then you're imitating and that's the form of suicide. That's a famous quote from some.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about behavior, right? So, how do you, how are you behaving now and how do you want to behave in the future? That behavior is by directional. In other words, the marketplace behaves towards a verselle. That's the name we created for Guillermo. And they behave towards the marketplace. And that's an important point because everything, you know, buildings are bidirectional. The look at a building, you behave differently towards a temple than you or a church versus, you know, a holiday inn in terms of how that architecture states. So we focus on that. Behavior is closely aligned for us with experience. How do you want this brand, the experience of this brand? Now, when we listen to those things, we begin to think about, you know, rhythm of the name.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very nice of Guillermo. He is a very impressive innovator in this category and we greatly enjoyed working with him. Well, our process is real. I break it down in three steps. First, we have to identify, then we invent, and then we implement. So it's just three things. It's not rocket science, but it does, it's a combination of creativity and discipline, right? And obviously talented people and experience in these things. So let's just kind of go through those things. In the first section of identify, it's really trying to find out from the client”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just by the way, in the book, there's no mention of marketing or brand strategy or any of these things. But if you read it, you begin to see that it's marketing really is about asymmetric advantage. And so why not start from the very beginning with an advantage? That's the value of an aim.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And this is maybe a little bit off tangent. But one of the best books on marketing I've ever read, which is not a book on marketing. And you may have read it along the way in college if you studied any Greek or classics. It's called the Melian Dialogues. And it's a dialogue. We'll take anybody listening to this maybe 25 minutes to read it between the Athenians and the government of Milos and the Athenians had decided that they needed that island. And they went and approached them very nice way, but that we want to take over the island. Nothing will change. You'll be taxed a little bit, but we'll protect you. And the Athenians had thought every aspect about how to take that island before. So by the time they got there, they had created asymmetric advantage in terms of ships and men and all this other stuff.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second thing is this notion of what I call asymmetric advantage. It makes perfect sense and most clients agree with this when we say this is that even before you launch this brand, why not start with an advantage in the marketplace? And you won't get an advantage if you're descriptive. If you are cloud pro and there's 10 other cloud services, you're not going to stand out in the marketplace. You won't have the ability to create that necessarily that cumulative advantage in the marketplace. So those are my two reasons why names are, I think, done right and we do talk about our mission is not creating good names. A lot of people can do that. Our mission is to create the right name for clients. And because the right name does deliver. Asymmetric advantage and cumulative advantage for you. And that, for us, has almost unlimited value.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's look just at the reality of this. Your brand name, whether it's a product name or a company name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change. Message will change. Products will change, right? But that name is there. So I like to talk about this idea of cumulative advantage. Over time, as people buy more and more of the product, they see it more often that their bond between you and that brand or them in the brand, I should say, becomes stronger and stronger. So you want that name to stick in their mind to be distinctive.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My back like water off a duck is what my grandmother would say. But I think along the way, as we talked about it, they began to warm up to this. And now, of course, it's, I don't know, a hundred billion dollar brand or something like that. But that's an example of, I haven't seen that brand before. I'm very comfortable with cloud. Cloud is what it is. That's the, you know, we're describing it, but that's a statement. And I think that, well, I don't think I know that's what I said in one of the presentations is you don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story, right? And Azure is going to behave differently in the marketplace than Cloud Pro, which is, I think, one of the names that we presented to them on the other side at their request.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he did that, and we along the way, we We came up with this word Azure, which is another word for blue. And so there was a link to clouds, blue sky, clouds, things like that. But we really presented it based on its linguistic qualities. It's a noisy word, that Z in there. It starts with an A, you know, and it ends in a nice smooth flow. So we really strive to do create names that are balanced and in a very busy competitive world, having some strong signal, which is generated by noise, is a good thing. The reaction wasn't good. You know, one of the clients said, that's just a dumb idea. And remarks like that at this point, after these four decades, it sort of rolls off my.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll talk about Microsoft Azure. So when Microsoft came to us, They were pretty much stuck, and Marcus Roff does, and in many ways to their credit, a lot of things don't need to be named. They don't need trademarks. They don't need brand names. They need scriptors. And so they came to us to develop a name that started or ended with cloud. Made sense to them because it was a cloud service. And our reaction was, if you do that, you're going to be in an ocean of other cloud, this cloud that. And you have an opportunity as Microsoft here to really emerge as a leader in this. And so There was a discussion about okay, we'll take a look at those, but we'd like to see some cloud names, which is easy to do, by the way.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have to help people think about it's not about the past you're actually creating the future and we really talk to people and emphasize the idea this this isn't a name you're creating that this we're creating the experience for you we're gonna work together And we really, our conversations always start with talk to us about how you behave now and how you want to behave in the future, as opposed to tell me about your positioning, tell me about your values, tell me about your mission. That's really kind of old thinking. It's very traditional. And that did work 25 or 30 years ago. But this is a far more complex interconnected world, a digital world now that stuff just doesn't create, it doesn't create names like Sonos or some of our other credentials that we probably will talk about today.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of psychology to this, which ironically I never even took a psychology class in college or graduate school. But the first element is humans do like to be comfortable. And one of the mechanisms of comfort is if something's been successful before, then I feel like I can approve it or select it. This is why, you know, a movie's like Harry Potter or even novels like Jack London's Call of the Wild get rejected so many times. I think Harry Potter was rejected 16 or 18 times and Jack London's book even more than that. I mean, think about it. He's pitching a book and he say, what are you talking about here? You're saying a dog becomes a wolf. I've never heard of anything like that. So we really do.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“people to give the confidence that going bolder and bigger and being uncomfortable. I use the expression there is no power in comfort, not in the marketplace.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it happens all the time, and it's a little bit bidirectional. Most clients, and I can understand this right, they come to a naming project absolutely believing with full confidence that they're going to know it when they see it. And the truth is it almost never happens. I have now, I think this year we'll hit 4,000 projects that we've completed. And it's interesting, you know, we'll tell people in a very polite way, you're not going to know when we see it. But I know they don't believe me. And even when you could see them thinking that, you know what? He was right. I really have to think about this. I have to process it. And part of that, part of why clients don't like the bolder names, the more imaginative names that we present is they are looking for comfort. And that's the opposite that what you want to do. And part of our job here is to”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To, I got to go down there and make a bid for this. I don't do that often, by the way, but I felt very strongly about Sonos.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that got them thinking about this, but they were still hesitant. So I left that meeting in Santa Barbara And I came back and they were still struggling with it. And I went, I got on a plane, didn't even build them for this, went back down to Santa Barbara and met with them again and said, I really believe in this name. And I think it's the right for you. And at a certain point, one of the founders, you know, Bob McFarland, who's just a wonderful client, I could see him thinking and he said, you know, We're trying to name this for ourselves. And what we really should be doing is naming it for the marketplace and the customers. You know, I think Sonos now is the right name. And I feel really good about that. And he later wrote me a note about how I helped do that. And we use it sometimes in credentials presentations because it's such a nice note. But Sonos is something I'm so glad that I had this internal energy.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story I like to tell is a story of Sonos. One, a great client team. I worked with all the founders. But at the time, they were stuck on being in a brand name that put them in the entertainment business. And so when we presented Sonos, which has many qualities to it, it was rejected because it doesn't have enough sort of emotion to it. 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. You make speakers that allow for the flow of entertainment through these things. And Sonos is about sound, but it had a particular quality. It's called a palindrome, right? So which really means that you can flip it and it means the same thing. In the case of Sonos, you could also turn it upside down and it was essentially the same.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to know it when they see it. And the truth is it almost never happens.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your brand name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change. Messing will change. Products will change. But that name is there.”
2025-06-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source