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David Placek: prediction

29 Jun 2025 Lenny's Podcast Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding)

“I think Harry Potter was rejected 16 or 18 times, and Jack London's book even more than that.”

— David Placek

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
David Placek
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
29 Jun 2025
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Wow. There's so much here already. So this idea of you're not going to know it when you see it is something that people come in with thinking like, "Once I see it, it'll be obvious." Just why is that almost never the case? Is it because the name has to be something that is uncomfortable? There's a lot of psychology to this, which ironically, I never even took a psychology class in college or graduate school. But the first element is humans do like to be comfortable. And one of the mechanisms of comfort is if something's been successful before, then I feel like I can approve it or select it. This is why movies like Harry Potter or even novels like Jack London's Call of the Wild get rejected so many times. I think Harry Potter was rejected 16 or 18 times, and Jack London's book even more than that. I mean, think about it. He's pitching a book and they say, "What are you talking about here? You're saying a dog becomes a wolf? I've never heard of anything like that." So, we really do have to help people think about, "It's not about the past. You're actually creating the future." And we really talk to people and emphasize the idea, "This isn't a name you're creating. We're creating an experience for you. We're going to work together." And our conversations always start with, "Talk to us about how you behave now and how you want to behave in the future," as opposed to, "Tell me about your positioning, tell me about your values, tell me about your mission." That's really kind of old thinking. It's very traditional, and that did work 25 or 30 years ago. But this is a far more complex, interconnected world, a digital world now that stuff just doesn't create... It doesn't create names like Sonos or some of our other credentials that we probably will talk about today. Yeah, we're going to talk about just the process you guys go through, so stay tuned for that. But before we get to that, is there's another story you can share that shows this idea of being bold?…

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