David Placek: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. I think the process, at some point, I will hopefully write either a good article on this or maybe even a book. But this process would work for, I think, a lot of things. I know it would. All right now, what's that second layer that I talked about? Well, we have made significant investments in this area of linguistics and cognitive science, and it's in two ways. One, building proprietary knowledge. So we know through research that we funded, an extensive amount about an area in language called or linguistics called the sound symbolism. So, what are the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet and what do they do? How do they evoke things? Well, it turns out that each of those letters sends out a signal that creates a certain sort of vibration, if you will, or experience. Now, there's been research on that over the years but there were some gaps, and we decided to fill this. And over the years, we've had a very good relationship with Stanford University, with their Department of Linguistics. We've hired linguists from MIT, from Berkeley. We have a linguistic internship here. I actually just ran this number, preparing for this discussion. We have employed, over four decades now, 253 linguists. Most of them PhDs, some of them contracts, some of them actual employees. That's a lot of intellectual knowledge. So we really have, what I call, a linguistic engine here. And then we now have an operating network of... I just checked on this figure yesterday. We have 108 linguists in 76 countries that help us. Some of them do creative work, others will do just the analysis of names for us. So now, we have that creative framework, we have creative teams working on this. Now, we're tapping into databases that have over 18,000 small word units, technically called morphemes. So, we also can tap in from a sound standpoint. What are the sounds of reliability? What are the sounds of aliveness? And so with Sonos, by the way, we wanted things that are somewhat noisy. And so S is a noisy letter, like a Z or even a V. And so, you begin to set priorities about what letters we're going to use. And that work from that, we call it an engineering layer floats up into the creative teams. And so, it's a mixture of things at a certain point in time. All right. Now, what happens to all that? At a certain point, usually 3 to 4 weeks into this, we might have 2 or 3,000 ideas. I say ideas because they're not all solutions, they're not all workable. They may be just beginning ideas, concepts. And we sift through those. And now one of the major challenges that we face, and certainly our clients face, is the need to clear a trademark for it to be not in conflict with a marketplace that is... We're almost reaching a tipping point in terms of difficulty of clearing names here. And so we have paralegals here, and we have a trademark attorney, and we'll analyze those names. That gets us to a much smaller set. hing a tipping point in terms of difficulty of clearing names here. And so we have paralegals here, and we have a trademark attorney, and we'll analyze those names. That gets us to a much smaller set. And then, we'll do our linguistic work with our linguists, and we end up with a set of names to show our clients. We'll do this twice with most assignments. Sometimes, we'll do just one time depending on timing and budget. But we really try to get two cycles here, partly because humans love to compare. If you're looking for a house, you don't just look at the first house and say, "Okay, let's sign us up." You look and you learn that we don't need a swimming pool, but we do need a view. It's the same with names. And so, we get feedback from our clients. And sometimes, that's a co-creative process where a client will come up with a word or a solution and we'll then run that through our screening mechanisms for them. And that's really the process. The final phase is implementing. Let's actually pause at that because I would, so much, I want to talk about with the second step, but we'll get to the step three. They're just blowing my mind, all the things you guys do here. This is incredible. There's so many things here that are so unlike what I expected. First of all, the creative folks that are actually coming up with these names, what's the background of these people? Who are these people?…

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