Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos

Key Concepts:

• Brand Naming: The process of creating a name for a product or company.
• Cumulative Advantage: The increasing benefit a brand gains over time as more people use and recognize it.
• Asymmetric Advantage: An initial advantage a brand has in the marketplace, often due to a distinctive name.
• Polarization: Strong, conflicting opinions about a name within a team, indicating its potential strength.
• Sound Symbolism: The idea that the sounds of letters evoke certain feelings or associations.
• Processing Fluency: The ease with which the brain can process information, making simpler names more appealing.
• Synchronicity: Connecting two unrelated ideas together.

1. The Importance of a Great Name

• A brand name is the most frequently and longest-used element of a brand.
• Design, messaging, and products change, but the name remains constant.
• A great name provides cumulative advantage and asymmetric advantage.
• Cumulative advantage is created through distinctiveness, helping the name stick in people's minds.
• Asymmetric advantage means starting with an advantage in the marketplace, which descriptive names often fail to provide.
• Lexicon Branding's mission is to create the right name, not just a good name, to deliver these advantages.

2. The Naming Process: Identify, Invent, Implement

• Lexicon Branding's naming process consists of three steps: identify, invent, and implement.
• Identify:
  • Focus on behavior: How the client behaves now and how they want to behave in the future.
  • Consider the bidirectional nature of behavior: How the marketplace behaves towards the brand and vice versa.
  • Align behavior with experience: How the brand experience should feel.
  • Analyze the competitive landscape: Identify existing brand names and language used in the space to ensure distinctiveness.
  • Develop a creative framework: A "window" for exploring names with depth, breadth, and diverse personalities.
• Invent:
  • Use small, diverse creative teams: Two to three teams of two people each.
  • Give each team a different briefing: One team knows the project details, another thinks they're working for a competitor, and a third names something unrelated.
  • Leverage linguistics and cognitive science: Utilize proprietary knowledge of sound symbolism and a network of linguists.
  • Tap into databases of morphemes (small word units) to find sounds associated with desired qualities (e.g., reliability, aliveness).
  • Generate thousands of ideas (not necessarily complete solutions) and sift through them.
  • Clear trademarks and conduct linguistic analysis to narrow down the list.
  • Present names to clients in two cycles to allow for comparison and feedback.
• Implement:
  • Help clients with internal presentations: Provide rationales and prototypes (e.g., name on a baseball cap, mock-up ad).
  • Conduct consumer research: Gauge customer expectations and how the names fire their imagination.
  • Focus on whether the name creates a predisposition to consider the product as different from competitors.

3. The Creative Team

• Key qualities for creative team members: curiosity, hard work, and low egos.
• Unlike advertising, naming requires generating a large volume of ideas that can withstand legal and linguistic scrutiny.
• Look for tenacious people who can handle rejection and keep generating ideas.
• Software tools are used to generate ideas and directions based on sound symbolism and word units.
• Ideal backgrounds include newspaper reporters (fast-paced, stories get rejected) and speechwriters (crank out material, get rejected).

4. The Linguistic Filter

• Linguists evaluate names for negative or positive connotations, cultural implications, and political implications.
• They identify potential issues that might slow down clients.
• The linguistic network includes 108 linguists in 76 countries.
• Names are often rejected due to cultural or sexual connotations.

5. Sound Symbolism and Letter Vibrance

• Each letter of the alphabet evokes a certain feeling or experience.
• V is the most alive and vibrant sound (e.g., Corvette, Viagra).
• B is one of the most reliable sounds (e.g., Blackberry).
• Z is a noisy letter (e.g., Azure).
• X is fast and crisp (associated with innovation).
• Consider both the semantics (meaning) and sound symbolism of letters.

6. Naming AI Products

• Naming AI products is challenging due to the fast-moving nature of the category and the technical backgrounds of engineers.
• Engineers often want more sophisticated names, but simpler, more tangible names may be more effective.
• Research is crucial to understand how consumers and developers think about AI.
• The goal is to create names that are more natural and easier for people to grasp.

7. When to Change a Name

• Startups that chose a placeholder name early on.
• Companies that have pivoted and their current name no longer reflects their identity.
• Companies that have merged and want to signal a new start.

8. Naming for Startups with Limited Resources

• The Diamond Exercise:
  • Draw a diamond shape.
  • At the top: "Win" - How do you define winning?
  • Right side: "What do you have to win?" - What are your existing strengths?
  • Bottom: "What do you need to win?" - What resources or capabilities are required?
  • Left side: "What do you have to say to win?" - What message do you need to convey?
• Focus on behavior and experience: How do you want to behave in the marketplace, and what kind of experience do you want to create?
• Generate a large volume of names (1,000-1,500) and directions without evaluating them.
• Speculate on the potential of each name: What could you do with this name?
• Look for names that are different from what's already out there.
• Ask employees and friends for feedback, focusing on what the name does for them, not just their opinion of it.
• If your team is comfortable with the name, it's probably not bold enough.
• Look for polarization: strong, conflicting opinions about the name.

9. The Importance of .com

• The .com domain is less important than it used to be.
• It has become like an area code.
• Focus on getting the right name first, then worry about the domain.
• There are ways around not having the .com (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, alternative domains).

10. Final Tip

• Forget about the word; think about behavior and experience.
• Embrace synchronicity: Look for inspiration in unrelated areas (e.g., hunting magazines for a sailboat company).

11. Notable Quotes

• "If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet."
• "Polarization is a sign of strength in the word."
• "You don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story." (Regarding Microsoft Azure vs. Cloud Pro)
• "There is no power in comfort, not in the marketplace."
• "Our mission is not creating good names. A lot of people can do that. Our mission is to create the right name for clients, because the right name does deliver asymmetric advantage and cumulative advantage for you."
• "Marketing, really, is about asymmetric advantage. And so, why not start from the very beginning with an advantage? That's the value of a name."
• "Humans only pay attention to what is new or what is different."

12. Conclusion

The process of brand naming is a complex blend of creativity, linguistics, and strategic thinking. A great name is not just a label; it's a powerful asset that can provide a cumulative and asymmetric advantage in the marketplace. By focusing on behavior, experience, and distinctiveness, and by embracing the power of sound symbolism and linguistic analysis, companies can create names that resonate with customers, differentiate themselves from competitors, and drive long-term success. Even startups with limited resources can benefit from these principles by following a structured approach, seeking diverse perspectives, and prioritizing boldness over comfort.