What's in a brand name? For Lexicon Naming of Sausalito, there's a booming business.

Lexicon created those names and many more for its clients. Fortune 500 companies such as Intel, Coors, Hewlett-Packard and General Mills.

With millions of dollars riding on each new product launch, these companies are willing to pay the experts to come up with something catchy and more importantly, effective.

"The strength of a newly created name will have a direct effect on how well the company will be able to market products and services for the next 20 to 30 years," David Placek, president of Lexicon.

"What you want is a name that captures the essence of the product or that tells a story--a name that gives a product momentum."

Placek founded Lexicon in 1982 when the then advertising executive recognized the need for distinctive brand names in a world becoming evermore cluttered with them.

"As an ad executive, I realized it was very difficult to develop brand names," Placek said.

"And it wasn't going to get easier because the amount of conflicting public trademarks would make it almost impossible for companies to create new names."

Placek thought his idea was so good he quit a high-paying job at a major ad agency to launch Lexicon.

"It was a very simple idea that if I could structure a specialized, creative company that could quickly deliver a superior brand name, people would use our services."

And they have. In 13 years, Placek and his colleagues have christened more than 800 products and companies.

The business is lucrative: Lexicon gets paid $25,000 to $40,000 and occasionally much more to give tags to everything from breakfast cereal to automobiles.

Lexicon has found a willing group of clients in Silicon Valley technology companies, but its next foray will be in Hollywood. That's because Placek just inked a deal with 20th Century Fox to name as many as 20 movies in the next two years.

Placek said the business of naming products is both an art and a science. "A great name is a product of well thought-out positioning strategy coupled with excellent, creative execution," Placek says.

Lexicon's 13 employees often find themselves brainstorming over pizza in the Lexicon "war room," a vault formerly used by the Navy's Pacific Fleet Command. They toss out ideas with reckless abandon, hoping for a gem to emerge.

But along with that creative energy goes a lot of research and linguistic science. Lexicon's director of linguistics is Dr. Will Leben, professor in the linguistics department at Stanford University, and the company has full-time linguists on its staff, as well as consulting linguists in Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo.

"Linguistics is a key part of the name-generation process," Placek said. "It is a precise tool to measure the effect produced by sound and spelling patterns."

Lexicon has invested in research in the area, most recently funding a project at Stanford and University of California at Berkeley. The study involving 144 test subjects showed that sound is as important as meaning in influencing shoppers.

For instance, the research suggested that names beginning with the consonants V, F, and S sound the fastest, while dependability was best suggested by the sound B, D, and P.

Thus, the Sarrant automobile sounded faster than the Tarrant, while the Polmer laptop sounded more dependable than the Folmer.

Placek said there are a lot of bad brand names out there.

For instance, brand names ending in "a" have become very popular. Acura and Maxima have been joined by Altima, Achieva, Previa and Adapta.

Placek said that names ending in "a" aren't bad when they're based on meaningful morphemes-- word roots from English, Latin, or Greek that are recognized by most people. Such names include Acura, Optima, and Quadra.

But some names, such as Achieva, sound like regionalized pronunciations, such as a New Englander saying "achiever." These names, Placek said, are usually ineffective.

Most bad names are the result of companies trying to do the job themselves. Placek said the people naming such products usually lack linguistic expertise.

In the future, Placek said, good brand names will become even more valuable.

"There is a limited optimal set of names, so companies are beginning to perceive them as strategic corporate assets."

As appeared in the Marin Independent Journal,
Sunday, January 8, 1995