Unlocking the Power of AI Naming with Lexicon’s David Placek

By Marty Swant  •  December 8, 2023  •  5 min read  •

Naming new companies and new products in new categories is something Lexicon CEO and Founder David Placek has done for decades. His agency, founded more than 40 years ago, has come up with numerous brands’ brand names that evolved from novel to iconic. Lexicon’s list includes Pentium and Powerbook, but it’s also the brain behind Blackberry, Sonos, Azure and Oculus Go. Beyond tech, it’s also come up with car names including Outback and Forrester for Subaru and EVs like the Lucid. It also came up numerous other names including the Impossible Burger and Embassy Suites along with Swiffer and Febreze.

As the world grows its own AI lexicon, Digiday spoke with Placek to talk about the the emerging category, what makes a good name and current trends in AI names. (He also mentioned Lexicon is currently working with three AI startups, but staying away from anything anthropomorphic.)

“I think about as an analog of when IBM came out with the IBM 360 and all of a sudden there was all this processing power,” Placek said. “And now, this is like a multiplier of that.”

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

We’re advising new startups is [to choose] something that has a blend of balance. We don’t want something too harsh. With GPT, there’s a lot of noise in there. It’s not the most memorable pattern either, right?…If they come to us and said, ‘We want to do something with this,’ we would’ve recommended something else. Our names that we hope will come out in the future will be more like Lexus. There’s some hardness to it, but some softness. So hardness of technology, reliability, but approachable, usable and more fluid. And I think we will work a lot in terms of coining something new because these are new ideas. We just want to make people comfortable, we want to signal a new idea, but make them comfortable with this new idea.

We’ve done a lot of research in terms of this area of linguistics called sound symbolism. The beauty about sound symbolism is that every letter in the English alphabet evokes certain kinds of associations. And not all of them, but many of them are global in nature. I always use the sound of the letter ‘V’ as an example. Whether you’re born in Paris or Brooklyn it’s going to signal aliveness, movement, a little bit of vitality. You can even say a little bit of daring sounds. So think about a Corvette. That’s a great name for a high performance… We did research for a four-year period across nine countries to identify statistically reliable information on those individual sounds.