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  • Procter & Gamble's Swiffer, Febreze, the new Sonos sound system.

  • I'm the founder and president of Lexicon Branding.

  • We want to create names that are noteworthy.

  • Something that makes people think there may be something different here, something better for me.

  • Lexicon has named almost 4,000 brands in 19 countries.

  • Like BlackBerry, Dibs, and all of these.

  • They charge somewhere between 40 and 250 thousand dollars.

  • And David says it's worth the price.

  • He's been naming things for over 30 years.

  • And it's not as simple as you might think.

  • There's a lot of work that goes into it, and it's as much a science as it is an art.

  • One of the things that we've invested quite a lot of money in is this area of sound,

  • technically called sound symbolism in the world of linguistics.

  • Lexicon spent two million dollars and five years studying the sounds of letters and the associations we have with those sounds.

  • We went to Poland, France, Japan.

  • And what we found was that some things are very universal.

  • For example, the sound of "V."

  • Whether you're born in Paris or you were born in the Bronx, "V" is about aliveness and vitality.

  • That's one of the reasons they named this car Venza.

  • We also were able to identify names that communicated or supported more reliability than others.

  • So the sound of "B" and "T," highly reliable.

  • Hence, BlackBerry.

  • BlackBerry also stands out because it's not literal.

  • David says a bad name is one that's too descriptive.

  • You know, there's always this temptation to use logic to explain something.

  • But what fires the imagination and the human mind is not logic.

  • A perfect example of this, David says, is Swiffer, one of Lexicon's biggest naming successes.

  • One of the things that they had tried to trademark, and fortunately, I think, for them and for us, it wasn't available, was ProMop and EasyMop.

  • Their perspective was that they had improved the mop.

  • We were quick to point out to them that this doesn't really look like a mop.

  • David and his team surveyed 30 people about cleaning.

  • No one liked to mop.

  • Our creative insight and strategy was, let's put some joy in the world of mopping and cleaning.

  • We have that action of sweeping.

  • We have the -er of the verbal ending, but there's no such thing as Swiffer.

  • At the same time, a competitive company came out with ReadyMop.

  • But it didn't do anything, it didn't get my attention, it wasn't noteworthy.

  • And today as we sit here in this interview, Swiffer is somewhere around a six billion dollar brand sold in 15 countries.

  • But David says naming things today is a lot harder than when he first started.

  • For one, there are just way fewer names to choose from.

  • In 2004, there were 1.2 million active trademarks in the US.

  • Now, there are two million.

  • There were almost 640,000 applications filed last year alone.

  • And because of the internet, any product that comes out now is essentially global.

  • That means you have to work harder to stand out.

  • And you have to be sure your name works in more than one language and culture.

  • And so if your name in Portuguese or French means something negative or untoward, you're gonna hear about it.

  • So, it's worth getting it right.

  • When you think about it, nothing will be used more often or for longer than a company or a product's brand name.

  • So what we do becomes vitally important. That makes it interesting to me.

Procter & Gamble's Swiffer, Febreze, the new Sonos sound system.

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