Lexicon Proves That Naming Is a Bit Scientific
In the category of there-is-a-business-for-everything, Lexicon stands tall. Founded in 1982 by David Placek, they are a firm devoted to inventing names for products. Among their biggest successes are Pentium, for Intel; PowerBook for Apple, BlackBerry for Research in Motion; and Dasani for Coca-Cola. They were recently profiled in the October 3 New Yorker magazine.
Entrepreneurs may be able to come up with that pivotal idea for their business enterprise, but the right name can be elusive–and important. In 1980, according to John Colapinto’s article, there were fewer than 10,000 registered high-tech trademarks in the United States; today there are more than 300,000. So it is that much harder to stand out now. And what makes someone good at creating a business may be different from inventing a name—especially now that names need to work globally, be easily searchable and still roll off the tongue.
“Placek maintains that the best brand names, like poems, work by compressing into a single euphonious word an array of specific, resonant meanings and associations. But he prefers to emphasize the practical aspects of his work,” Colapinto writes. “’I’ve learned that if I use that with prospective clients—‘Hey, what we’re creating here is a small poem’—you can see people sort of get concerned,’ he told me. ‘Like, This isn’t really about art here. This is about getting things done.’”
Placek’s background is interesting. He worked on the Levi’s account for an ad agency, naming Little Levi’s for a line of children’s jeans. (Alliteration is good, he discovered later.) He followed closely the tenets of the book, The Practice of Creativity by George Prince, and the beliefs of psychologist William J.J. Gordon. “Trust things that are alien and alienate things that are trusted.” He liked introducing unexpected stimuli into naming sessions, “maybe passing out sports magazines if we’re naming a women’s cosmetic.”
Lexicon came up with Outback for Subaru. Again, Placek’s methods show unusual roots. “I love Oscar Wilde’s line that an idea that isn’t dangerous is hardly worth calling an idea at all,” he said. The article’s main thesis is that most good names do not come about by accident. Some exceptions to this rule are Google—derived from a misspelling of googol—Coca-Cola—from an accountant who liked the two C’s—Zynga—named after CEO Mark Pincus’s late American bulldog—and most famously, Twitter—which was picked out of a hat.
But for Lexicon, it’s a process. For PowerBook, Placek wanted to stress the portable, things that are small. He combined that with the idea of computing speed and performance. The article said that some people at Apple thought it was boring. But Placek insisted that, more importantly, it was new.
Focus groups or some kind of testing are also important elements of successful naming. For Pentium, Placek conducted worldwide testing, asking people what a car called the Porsche Pentium might mean to them. The respondents used words like premium and performance, exactly the identity Intel was seeking. Intel CEO Andy Grove called it “one of our great success stories.” According to their own research, Pentium became a more recognized brand than Intel, “which is actually a little scary,” Grove said.
What does this mean for all of us? Probably that we need to take a step or two back and think a bit more when we’re coming up with something new, be it a company, a product, a newsletter or even some kind of subscriber program. A great idea can be undermined by a not-so-great name. Some tips from the article: keep the names short; a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern often works well (Gatorade, Lipitor, Amazon); and try to use pleasant sounds or alliteration. But Placek emphasizes that the real goal is to determine what story you want to tell and then find a word that evokes that—“without being predictable or even necessarily logical.”
***********************************************************
The name of the upcoming SIPA/SIPF Webinar
is pretty straightforward (and important):
Group Sales and Site Licenses
Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011, 1 pm EST
PLACE: Your telephone and computer
COST: FREE for SIPA members!
Speakers: Anne Holland of Anne Holland Ventures and
Michele Givens from Editorial Projects in Education (EPE)
Your webinar registration includes:
– A site license to attend the conference;
– A written transcript emailed when you take our survey;
– The opportunity to connect with our speakers during Q&A.
SIGN UP TODAY!
[text_ad]
