Brand naming has never been more complex — or more critical.
Back on the podcast, David Placek, founder and Creative Director of Lexicon Branding (the minds behind Swiffer, Dasani, BlackBerry, Sonos, and more) joins Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney for a deep dive into the always evolving world of naming.In this episode, we revisit and reframe one of our most popular conversations to explore how AI, trademark saturation, and evolving global markets are redefining the naming landscape in 2026.
What we cover:
✅ Why naming is more emotionally charged (and legally complex) than ever
✅ How AI is impacting brand naming — from workflows to expectations
✅ Strategic triggers for a rename and when it’s not the answer
✅ The rising stakes of creating distinct, ownable, and global brand names
✅ What’s changed (and what remains timeless) in the art and science of naming
Whether you're a founder, CMO, or brand leader navigating a renaming or naming from scratch, this episode is packed with insights to help you make smarter, more strategic naming decisions.---
00:00 - Introduction
04:30 - What has changed in the naming industry over the last 40 years?
08:11 - Where are the biggest challenges with trademarks?
15:12 - The most common reasons why people rename
18:45 - The nitty gritty details of trademarking
24:37 - When do you advise clients that they don’t need a name change
26:14 - What the brand naming process looks like behind-the-scenes
37:58 - David’s final tip for anyone beginning a brand rename
TRANSCRIPT
[Bill Kenney]
Hey everyone. This is Bill Kenney, co-founder and CEO of Focus Lab, a global B2B branding agency. I'm back with another episode of In Conversation. Fun fact, I recorded a similar episode four years ago with the same person. His name is David Placek. He is the founder of Lexicon, the premier naming agency in the world.
A lot has changed in four years. With the introduction of AI, the challenges of trademarking, with the volume of applications and business development, it was time to talk about naming again.
So David and I got back together and we sat down for this conversation to cover: What is new and different in the naming world? What does it look like these days to try to trademark a name? How long does that take? Then generally speaking, what does the naming process look like when working with Lexicon?
Uh, ways to identify if you are in need of a name change and also when you don't need a name change, when a name is not going to particularly solve the business problems. We talk about all of that more. David is a gem of a human. You're gonna love this conversation.
If you're curious about brand naming, this is the episode for you. Enjoy.
[Bill Kenney]
Alright, David, we're back at it. Welcome back to the show. I know you and I have seen each other multiple times since then.
You've become a great friend. But we recorded four years ago. That video that you and I recorded very casually without much of a plan, has 16,000 views, 383 thumbs up. This is all on YouTube. Not a single thumbs down.
Hey, must be our looks. We're doing something right. And we both have recently even had a client call as a result of somebody seeing this video about naming, which is why we're back to do it again.
We have better cameras now. Um, grayer, grayer beards, uh, but more knowledge, more experience. And, um, yeah. I'm excited to talk about the world of naming with you. If you wanna just take a minute, maybe introduce yourself and tell people who you are and what the hell you do.
[David Placek]
It would be my pleasure. I'm David Placek. I'm the founder and creative director of Lexicon Branding. A firm that is totally devoted to the development of brand names for strategic products and services. Our headquarters are in Sausalito, California, and we have an office in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, for our European business.
[Bill Kenney]
And some pretty, some pretty notable names. The people that are watching for the first time that don't know anything about you are gonna be looking in the background going like, Ooh, Swiffer, you know, Blackberry's hiding behind you. Um, you've got Sonos, you've got Azure hiding over there in the corner.
Um, really, really great work. I think people are wowed when they first come across you, I suspect. And they see the names that you've worked on. So props to you.
[David Placek]
Well, thank you. And we've been very fortunate. We've worked with some marvelous clients on some truly exciting products. One of the great things about this company is we see the future. Not every week, but uh, honestly, every three weeks someone walks through our doors with something that we know is gonna change the world a little bit or a lot.
And we certainly have been seeing that in the last couple years as AI products and services and technologies have come into fruition.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. I bet, I bet. Because we feel that a little bit, but we're even more downstream from you. It's a pretty interesting and unique position to be in where you're seeing and hearing about the latest and greatest things that are coming into the market.
[David Placek]
It is, and it, and it comes from, you know, all different areas. You know, it can be something in automotive, it can be something in aerospace. And, you know, more often than not now, it's something to do with artificial intelligence.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. And tell me how long you've been doing this again? Remind me, is it 40-something years?
[David Placek]
We're under our fourth decade here, so, so, um, yeah. Yeah. When you look at statistics on small businesses, which is what we are, It is very rare for a small business to, to move through four decades.
[Bill Kenney]
Congrats. Congrats on the four decades. The world needs naming no matter what state it's in, it doesn't matter if it's early internet, before the internet, after the internet, AI, all these things, names are necessary.
You want to gimme maybe a quick highlight on how that game has changed over maybe the past 40 years?
[David Placek]
Yes, I'm happy to do that. When I started this firm, it was really a creative challenge for us. It was a challenge of what processes do we need? What knowledge do we need to make us successful? And success here is defined by helping our companies grow. Naming has evolved to be much more of a strategic endeavor at this point in time.
And the reason for that, it's still creative, I should say, I should back up for that. Um, but the reason why it's strategic is that names just have to do more. They have to work harder and do more in today's very complex, very competitive global, digital world. I know that's a mouthful, but think about those words that I've just said.
So, so a name now, let's go back just three decades ago. We weren't so worried about something being instantly global because three decades ago things weren't instantly global.
[Bill Kenney]
Sure.
[David Placek]
It was beginning to head in that direction. So we've had to develop a whole linguistic side in our business. There's way more competition, and so we like to describe consumers across any, any audience, any segment. Doctors, lawyers, B2B, they're dramatically distracted. And where even four decades ago it was hard to get people's attention. Now it's much harder to do that. And the challenge is in a very short period of time to not only get their attention, but move them to what I call a predisposition to consider, right?
So you, you have just a few seconds to do that, and that means the name has to be distinctive. It has to say something new, we call it or describe it as noteworthy.
And I always use the example if you're in a meeting, you know, you know, people are talking around the table and every once in a while someone says something that gets your attention, and you might describe that that was a noteworthy idea. I hadn't thought about that before. I haven't seen this on the shelf. I haven't seen this concept in the marketplace. And all that is really vital to success.
There's one other thing and then I'll stop and see if you have questions. Because we have this horizon here of looking at how brands have done and how they progress from launch over, you know, the first couple years. Going back a few decades, companies and investors were much more tolerant of a brand, kind of, I'll use the phrase, bumping along in the marketplace and investing and repositioning.
Now I see far less tolerance for that. You really have to get it right. You have to come out of the gates really strong. You have to really do a good launch. You have to get employee commitment to the new brand.
[Bill Kenney]
Yep.
[David Placek]
And, and all that takes more time and more resources than many of our clients are aware of.
And a lot of what we do in the early stages is coach people about, Hey, you need more staff to do this. I think it would be contract staff for a short period of time. But the idea that a CMO and a couple of assistants and a brand manager can do a major launch, those days are pretty much gone.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, yeah, you're right, because that whole narrative needs to be controlled. You can't just, again, throw it out there and let it bump along. There's no tolerance for that. The market is very opinionated, right? It has high expectations. It is also wildly distracting. You know, all these things. Yeah, I could see how the game is harder now as the naming agency, but you're still doing it and you're doing it successfully.
Where is the biggest challenge now? Is it AI and the speed of business building, creating, what, what is it now? Just more noise, harder to trademark these types of challenges.
[David Placek]
Well, you brought up trademarks, so let's talk about that for a moment. That is for us, and for our clients, one of the big hurdles for this because, and I'll just give you a statistic that I'm familiar with, when I started Lexicon, some of the viewers or listeners will know that trademarks are divided into classes.
And there's 45 of them. and in technology, uh, that, that's class nine. Um, in US Class nine, when I started, going back four decades, there was something less than, I think it, you know, the number was 23,000, registered trademarks in Class nine in the USA, right?
Today as we sit here, there are probably well over 2 million trademarks in the USA Class nine. Okay? Now, I mean, think about a dictionary. What dictionary, a fully loaded dictionary, has probably 500,000 words in it, right?
And so now if you're, if you're an Apple and you have a physical device, but you also have software in it.
So we're adding a class, and that software probably does communication things, so now you're adding another class. But a company like Apple doesn't just work in the US so when we're searching for a company like that, we're usually searching about 35 markets, and so the number just goes up and up and up.
[Bill Kenney]
Exponentially. Yes. Yes. Thank you for sharing that stat. You know, when I was watching the video that we recorded four years ago, something you said in there was this challenge, but this was pre-AI. That feels kind of weird to say, this thing is moving so fast. When we had that conversation, sure there were AI companies, but they were not on the public radar.
They were not even on my radar at all. We weren't working with any of those types of organizations, and you had already mentioned how noisy the trademarking process was and just like landing on a name that you can solidify and you basically said in that video said in three to four years, it's gonna be nearly impossible.
That's exactly what you said. I watched it not that long ago. Is this starting to feel impossible? Every name you come up with just, just, bam, bam, bam.
[David Placek]
We're definitely at an inflection point here of difficulty, and one of the things we're trying to do is move clients from an old model of one project at a time and work with them to look at the long-term horizon and begin naming and clearance now for a project that might be three years out from full development.
[Bill Kenney]
Got it.
[David Placek]
And one of the advantages that gives us and the client in particular, is that you have more time to negotiate with someone who might have the ownership on a mark, but maybe it's a smaller company and you can work out a licensing agreement.
If someone says, Hey, we gotta launch in, you know, eight weeks. Um, you're not gonna have time to negotiate with anyone. And so that's what we're trying to do and we're finding that with us, uh, clients are becoming more receptive to that kind of a model. Right. And it can be done in different ways. It can be informal, it can be formal, but the spirit of it is, let's start processes earlier.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I hadn't considered that at all. Is there a world, and I just thought of this while you were, you were talking, are there people that create names and squat on them? You know, this word squatting? Like the same way people buy URLs.
[David Placek]
Sure. Very, very, familiar. Yes. Now, that's been going on for a long time with URLs. The only good news there is the price of URLs has gone down because there are so many options. You have, you know, you can do dot-AI, dot-biz, all those different things. And in our world, our attitude is that the dot-com is nice to have, but you can have it by putting a word in front or in back of the name so you can say, you know, get, get alpha.com.
The URLs have become like telephone numbers or, or area code, right? Whether I'm in 415 or 602 really makes no difference to you.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. No, not at all. So we couldn't get focuslab.com and for a long time we had focuslabllc.com, which we all hated, because even our international clients are like, what is the LLC? What does that even mean? Um, now we have focuslab.agency because that's an extension that we can add and have that as URL and I quite like that.
I like it as much as focuslab.com. Yeah, I was just curious if people actually go out there and try to create a name, but they would have to be able to have a business built to be able to squat on the name. Nevermind the URL.
[David Placek]
That's correct. Now, you will find that clients will, you know, in quotes, squat on names. You can file in the US three names for a single project. Right. And it's fair because you're doing research, you know, you, you're doing positioning like that, but then you're supposed to abandon two of those when you go out.
But there are clients who squat on names just to the letter of the law thinking that, well, now we can use that for another wine or another, you know, car or something like that. It kind of violates the spirit of the law, but not technically the law.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. Very interesting. Yeah. This is why we have these conversations. You know all the inside stuff that we're all curious about.
[David Placek]
I think we should probably just have a brief conversation on information overload, because that's where AI comes in. Consumers now can get so much information, not necessarily reliable information, but on products and services, so that means they have more stuff coming at them.
And on the other side, clients, companies can use AI to market to you more aggressively, and understand you more. And, and so I think that's overload. You have more things coming at you, you have more information to process and what that results in, I'm not sure, but it's a factor in there, and I think that at some point will reach an inflection point where consumers will start disconnecting, from services and people they follow and things like that.
You know, it's so easy to put out, newsletters or, uh, you know, like what we're doing now podcasts that the audiences will be un inundated with this.
[Bill Kenney]
It'll be so much. Too much. Yeah. Only the good content will cut through. Hopefully we're somewhere on that side of the spectrum.
[David Placek]
I hope so. Yeah, that's, that's the goal.
[Bill Kenney]
You want to help the viewers and listeners understand the most common reasons why a company would rename. Like what's the 85%?
[David Placek]
Yeah, the most common, and I'll say that the legitimate reason to do this is that your business model has changed. You started out, you know, making, buggy whips and now you're making wagons, right? Is it to use an old phrase, right? And so, that name that you had before is slowing you down, right?
Sometimes it slows you down and you can kind of talk yourself into keeping it. Other times it's just really gonna drag you to the point where you're not gonna be successful. But combined with that, like, okay, I think, I think this name is not working. You also have to have a mission going forward that says we're changing our name and because of A, B, and C.
So those are kind of the logical reasons, but the emotional reasons for the consumer, the customer have to be there. This is good for you because now company X is gonna be doing more of this, less of that, and creating products that are to your advantage.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah.
[David Placek]
The consumer out there wants to know what's in it for me, and that's the only way that we've seen that name changes are successful. When there's an articulation of how the marketplace will be better off.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Um, huge plus one to that. Uh, we kind of touched on that earlier in the conversation, which is, you know, the CMO and having a, a group of people around them and a story and a narrative to build off of when that actually goes to market. The name, the new identity, all that stuff. I couldn't agree more. It's no different for the work that we do.
When that finally hits the market for the first time, there has to be a supporting story there. It can't just be, oh, everything's changed, and then everyone's back to work.
[David Placek]
You're, you're just throwing money down, down the drain, I think, to do that. And you know, there's one other, there were always a couple reasons, but you might've been a US centric company and now through digital improvements, and innovations, you are now more global and people are just stumbling on your name because of the way it's structured.
That's a legitimate reason to say, Hey, let's change the name and let's tell people what, what the exciting emotional message is.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. So essentially what you're saying is there, there has to be some deep core catalyst or driver for a name change and not a name change is not something to maybe do flippantly just because you feel like it's going to. Um, I don't know, because the company needs a shakeup, for lack of a better word.
[David Placek]
Not a reason to do that. Uh, yeah, it, it, you know, it's hard to change a name whether you're a startup with 30 people or you're a huge company with 5,000 people. It's all the same mechanics and you have to be thoughtful. You have to be deliberate. It takes time, obviously more money if you have 5,000 employees and lots of customers, and less if you're 30 employees and maybe you have 5,000 customers only.
So, so it's, it's different. But It's still difficult, it's still time consuming and you know, I'll use the word, it can be distracting if you don't have the resources and you might lose momentum that you have worked hard to gain.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, yeah. Do you find that? We can tread lightly here because I do as well. I never want to paint customers in a bad light. We're always grateful for customers. But do you find that customers often misunderstand maybe the level of effort that will go into the naming process? They enter the project going like, oh yeah, we need a new name.
And by the time they get to the end, they're like, wow, that was harder than I thought it was gonna be.
[David Placek]
Yes. And it's understandable really because, you know, most people have never changed a name or developed a new name. Right? And you think of names, it's a word, you know, how difficult can it be? So we completely. understand that. So that's why we spend some of our time just in that coaching phase of the stages we have to go through to trademark, and how that’s done.
Very few clients know anything about that. And really, are apt not to appreciate the difficulty of that. I use the comparison of when I talk to our accountant around tax time and he starts rambling on about this legislation and how this has changed. I just say, you know, I don't, I don't really need to know that. I just need to tell me, tell me what I owe or tell me what I'm getting back.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, yeah.
[David Placek]
And so I understand it. But that's one thing that we really take time to do is for our clients to understand the trademark process, what we do, and what their council needs to do. We ask them, check on their bandwidth, you know, check on their experience.
And then, you know, you have to have an outside counsel and a good outside counsel with trademark experience. And so all that's new to our clients and we, you know, we, you have to be patient. It's just something that they haven't done before. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, for sure. Understood. Right. We operate the same as you do, no surprise, because we're so culturally kind of similar, which is the idea of empathizing with the client's position.
We do this a hundred times, we do it 700 times. This is their first time or their second time. It's brand new for them.
[David Placek]
And by the way, usually the, the only time in their life that they'll do this. They find out that it is much harder than they thought.
There is some fun to it, it is exciting, but it's a lot of hard work. We had a wonderful client about five years ago who at the end of it, she said, listen, this has been great.
I love working with you guys, but I never wanna have a naming project again.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that the truth? The same for visual identity and verbal identity and all these things. Yeah. People trying to find the right words for their key purpose and their mission statements, and then trying to find like, you know, the right logo. These are really challenging problems, even though at the end when you see it, it might be, oh, surely it wasn't all that hard.
Yeah. Uh, yeah. Be in the trenches of that. Now, I know you can't gimme exacts, but I'm curious, so I'm gonna ask it even for my own curiosity. What's the fastest a trademark generally goes through or takes and what's the longest?
[David Placek]
Well, it used to be a lot, a lot shorter. Two things have happened there, I think with COVID, you know, staff reductions there, people working at home. I think things have slowed down in the system. And then there are so many more trademark applications to be processed that I don't know if they're overwhelmed, but they're very, very busy.
So, to answer your question, by the time you file an application, for you to be notified that you actually have that ‘Circle R’ is, if it passes through, you know, these review cycles are about a nine month period, if you're lucky. Nine months.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay, so that's on the, that's on the quick side then.
[David Placek]
That's on the quick side. Now, the examiners, you know, it goes into an examiner. They may pick up the phone and call you or write you back saying, you know, I don't understand this, or this isn't clear. You have to better explain this. And then that's another month or two months, right?
[Bill Kenney]
Sometimes at the end of that, you get the rejection letter and you're like, huh, shit. We're kind of back to, is it zero or is it back to another name that maybe that was bundled in that, I guess.
[David Placek]
Well, yeah, if you, you, if you file for three names, you're gonna file three separate applications. Right? So you, if one was rejected, you would still have them to go. Rejections usually come earlier than that, right? Then nine months. Uh, so, so you're good. And then there, there is a process in, in the application kind of continuum, where your mark is cleared by the examiner, and it's, and this is the phrase, it's published for opposition.
And this is where other people who own that mark or a very similar mark can oppose it.
That's posted for, uh, I believe it is 60 days. And at the end of that period, if no one opposes it, you're in very good shape to get a registered trademark. It doesn't mean that after you get that someone can, you know, file a suit against you.
So, that's always a very good day when you have been filed for opposition or published, sorry, for opposition, and then most people put it on their calendar. Okay. At the end of that time, people have a little celebration, a little relief, more than celebration.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah, because it is kind of one of these big, send it into the void, hope you get back what you're hoping to get back. Kind of moments where in the project it's just the two parties working together to resolve the, do we like this? Do we like that? Do we like it? That's kind of a big question mark, send it over the fence. Wish for the best. Yeah.
[David Placek]
Yeah. And you used the word void. I think that's an apt description of the trademark process into the void.
[Bill Kenney]
All right. Are there instances of companies coming to you saying, Hey, we're building this thing. We got this idea, or we need to change our name because of X, and you realize they're wrong. They do not need to change their name. That's actually not a valid reason.
[David Placek]
Yes. It's not a frequent occurrence for us, but candidly, it's not infrequent in that the first part of the engagement before we're really engaged is to tell us about what you wanna solve here. What's the opportunity? Why are you considering a name change? And we wanna work with people who we feel really do need a name change and they're committed to it, right?
So we really try to ask those questions in a very forthright way. And when we hear, from a company and a client team, well, you know, three of us really don't want to change our name, and three of us really do.
That's when I say, Hey, let's talk about that. because right away you're gonna run into that kind of resistance and we listen carefully to the arguments and, you know, we either side on one side or the other, but often, you know, or sometimes not, you know, not often we will withdraw from that and saying, I think you need to think this through and the six of you agree to change the name.
[Bill Kenney]
The projects are already hard enough, right? If you have stakeholders in there that don't think they even need it, oh man, that's, that's quite the wedge to start a project.
[David Placek]
Yes. That, that's very true.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah. All right. David, let's, we've talked a lot about naming, but I think it'll be really helpful for the viewers and the listeners to really talk about things like the day to day, the week to week, which is how we function, and I think very similar to you.
Let's talk about what it really looks like week to week in the naming process. So let's now presume they understand the value of a name, they actually need it, and they're ready and they're all engaged. Can you give us a sample of what that looks like? When they reach out to you, onboarding, deliverables, these types of things.
[David Placek]
We really have, we try to make it simple. We have really three steps in our process. And of course those steps have details, but the first step is to identify. The second step is to invent, right, create. And the third is to implement.
I'll just kind of take you through those really quickly on, on the first stage, identify. Our mission is not just to get a good name for our clients, it's to give them the right name, right? And that right name for us is a, as a word, it could be a real word, it could be a coin word, like a Kodak or a Navan behind me, or a Pentium. But it has certain distinctive advantages in the marketplace.
So, we love to use the word asymmetric advantage for it. So we spend time with the client team to talk about what are your opportunities and your problems, but mostly we spend time talking about their future and we really focus on behavior. and behavior for us is bi-directional. In other words, the company's work behaves towards the marketplace in a certain way.
And their customers behave towards them a certain way. And it's really interesting to have that conversation about how you want to behave in the marketplace and how you want your customers to behave about this, right? When I put on a t-shirt with the Nike Swoop, how do I wanna feel? How do I want to behave?
Right? How do you want that customer to do that? Because we actually name for behavior, we name for the future, not for now. We wanna know about problems or challenges and the competition because the name has to be more memorable and it has to have something original or noteworthy, as we talked about before.
So that's phase one that ends up in a small document, not long, that says, you know, given what we've heard, here's the framework. And we used, we don't use the word objectives because when you hear objectives, you want them to be really very tight, and we don't want tight objectives.
We want a framework to begin development. Beause we're gonna share a number of names with our clients. Um, so that's phase one, phase two, then, and that's working with the customers. And sometimes, depending on how complicated, complex the marketplace is, that might be two or three meetings.
Sometimes it's one meeting, right? Um, next phase we really go away. We're working here in small teams. We're using our linguists. Linguists play a role here to help us identify sounds and word parts, technically called morphemes. But we can just talk about prefixes and suffixes and in fixes.
And so that's about a three week turn because we're going to either present with one intense creative cycle or two intense creative cycles.
And then we're presenting names to our clients, and we're talking about, you know, what makes them memorable. We're talking about things like processing fluency.
Uh, we're comparing it to their competition. We're talking about their future and how this name plays that role in it, and they're reacting. We ask, you know, our advice is, let's not do, I like it or I don't like it. Let's not reject anything today. Let's think about how we could use these as tools, because in the end, a name is just a tool, that's all.
And it has nothing to do with the people selecting the name has to do with the marketplace and that behavior that we've talked about.
We'll listen to them though, and we'll learn from that. Names stimulate responses. It is a catalyst. And then we do, do it again. While that's going on, our trademark team here, which now has three paralegals and a trademark attorney, anything we are interested in will go into them for analysis.
It's very rigorous analysis here. We don't just do, you know, inexpensive knockout searches. And so when we're presenting to clients, we're showing them names that are maybe 50% through the process, sometimes even more than that, right?
Then we go. So now we identify, invent, and now implement. This is where we're helping clients make those selections.
We have a program here that we call performance profiles where we're using our linguists around the world, and we have 107 linguists under contract to us, to profile those names in their languages. And we now have a small language model, actually we have seven of them now. For our insights from research, previous research investments that we've made and linguistic research that we've done. And we use AI to take those small language models and profile these names for us.
What we're always trying to do is take out some of the subjectiveness of naming and put in sort of strategic, objectivity to these things. And so we're doing that kind of work on a shorter list of names.
Uh, we also have a research team here, about 50% of our projects, we'll do research on almost all corporate names. We'll have research, right?
Except for startups, you know, where they're moving fast. I think entrepreneurs have more confidence, smaller boards, those types of things that they don't necessarily need to research.
And then the final stage here is what we call the bridge to a visual identity firm. We'll say this is the process we've been on. This is what we've learned. This is why this is the name. Here are the assets and liabilities of the name. And if we've done research that can be, you know, a two hour briefing session with them.
[Bill Kenney]
Yep. How many people are on the client side? Generally are joining those, kind of review meetings on your side where you're reviewing the names. Is it a small group? They try to jam too many people in there. What's, what's the best size?
[David Placek]
Yeah. The best size is a smaller group. You know, politics does enter into this with a large organization. Let's think about the process. We want to always start with a small group of three or four people. The next group might be a senior marketing team and the C-suite.
So maybe that's six or eight people. But we want those people to know what that creative framework is so we're not walking into a room saying, Hey, we're gonna show some names today. And when that happens and it does, you know, we get the thing like, well, why are we naming, what are you guys doing here?
And then finally there's who's gonna present to the board? Who's gonna present to the C-suite if we're not doing that? And so, we cover that early on because that's where names get sent back and then money and time is wasted.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Okay. Understood. Before we close out, I want to ask you if there's anything else you think we need to hit more clearly right on the nose.
[David Placek]
Well, I have a couple things. One, I really want to emphasize that the role of a brand name is larger than it ever has been before. And I think it will increase in its importance and its strategic values. And so it's not so much like, put more money into it, although it's gonna take more money, put more time into it.
We do get notes from people saying, you know, Hey, I worked with you, you know, 10 years ago and it was great. And right now I don't have any money, but we have generated names and we generated 50 names and can you look at these? And, and, and by the way, you know, occasionally we do that, but usually I will say, you gotta do more than 50 names, you know?
Okay. quantity does lead to quality here. It really does. I can't emphasize enough the changing role of brand names in the marketplace. That they are strategic now, and I think their strategic importance will increase. And so hopefully companies will get ahead of that curve, right?
Because it's almost, it's almost like the proverbial hockey, uh, puck curve.
I think the other thing that we face all the time, uh, with companies is a naming process. You really wanna lead it. You don't wanna manage it, right? You, you want to give people the freedom, the encouragement, uh, you wanna push people along, you wanna be very tolerant.
And that increases the likelihood of coming out with a name like a Swiffer or a Febreeze, or, you know, Lucid Motors. In all those cases, we have people who are more on that, we're gonna help you lead this Lexicon, we're not gonna provide oversight and management of you.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Okay.
[David Placek]
I think it would be the same thing in any creative business.
[Bill Kenney]
Absolutely. Yeah. We definitely want to show up in a way where we are helping and leading the client, not just creating a sandbox for them to kind of explore and find a solution in themselves. It's ultimately not what they're hiring anyways, right? They're hiring you, they're hiring us.
They're, they're looking for experts because they don't know about the process and they don't know what they should be nervous about, excited about, indifferent about, these types of things.
[David Placek]
You know, the reality is for us and for companies we work with, none of these names that are behind my wall here, and many, so many of them are, you know, billion dollar brands. It’s hard to look at a name and say that's it, you know, the tendency and it's a human tendency to figure out what's wrong with it, right?
So we just have to work with that, and that's why with our performance profiles and our linguistic and cognitive science knowledge, we can put in that objectivity to, what is essentially a subjective business, you know, decision making model.
[Bill Kenney]
Which is why people benefit and often pay up to work with companies like yours and mine, because we're gonna help them through that subjective, biased, challenging part of a project. Like, it doesn't sound like anything to me yet. I don't like that logo. That doesn't mean anything to me yet. And then you and I are telling them. That's okay. That's okay.
[David Placek]
Yeah. We have two different companies, but both of us have processes that we put together so that you, a client, can come in at point A and walk out at point Z with confidence and with something, a tool that's gonna help them grow, whether it's visual or a word.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah.
[David Placek]
You know, that's a great thing to offer.
[Bill Kenney]
All right. Well, why don't you wrap us up with, if you are speaking to a founder tomorrow, which I'm sure you will, it's Saturday, so not tomorrow. Uh, if you were speaking with a founder of a startup or even a CMO of a Series B, Series C company, that has a legitimate reason to go through and rename their organization, what's the one thing you would tell them they need to do? What's the one thing they gotta get right? If you're only allowed to tell them one tip.
[David Placek]
Well, that's a great question. The first thing that comes to my mind as a tip for that person, on Monday, is to say, sit down and write what your announcement will be to your employees about this new name, our new name X is what is gonna take us into the future because it does A, B, and C, right?
And I said that that'll be the start of a good conversation. That would be my first tip.
[Bill Kenney]
I've done a lot of interviews now generally around branding and identity and rebrand. Not a lot on naming, but that's the first time I've heard anybody express that as a starting point tip, and I wanna commend you for that. I think that's so different and is a really valuable thought exercise for that founder/CMO. The same thing would be true if they were gonna go through a rebrand.
[David Placek]
Yes.
[Bill Kenney]
Pretend like you're at the end of that and now you're expressing this to the organization because that will get you not only ahead of that need, but it's gonna help you enter this project with a clear vision of what you're trying to get at the end.
Not just increase traffic and conversions on a website, but what's the push, what's the mission? What's the galvanizing kind of hoorah at the end that you want to deliver? Starting with that novel idea, sir, look at you. Look at you.
[David Placek]
You know, imagine the end and work backwards.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, I love that. I'm really glad I asked you that.
[David Placek]
It was a great question. It really was. So I'm glad I had a good answer every once in a while. Every once in a while I get it right.
[Bill Kenney]
Well, I knew it would be a pleasure. It was a pleasure. Until the next time, until I see you in the city and we have dinner again, have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for joining the show, David.
[David Placek]
Thank you for doing this. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you my friend.
