Strategic brand naming for billion-dollar products

A name is the longest-lasting asset of any brand.

Design, messaging, and products all change, but the name endures and accumulates advantage over time.

Why: Cumulative advantage: every exposure strengthens the bond between customer and brand.

"Your brand name, nothing's gonna be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, message will change, products will change, but that name is there."

Comfort is the enemy of a powerful name.

Teams instinctively prefer safe, descriptive names; breakthrough names feel uncomfortable at first.

Why: Humans seek familiarity; bold names create the asymmetry needed to stand out.

"If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet."

Polarization signals strength.

When a name splits the room—some love it, some hate it—it carries energy that descriptive names lack.

Why: Tension indicates memorability and differentiation; Andy Grove chose Pentium because it polarized Intel’s exec team.

"We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word."

Start with behavior and experience, not positioning statements.

Ask how the brand behaves now and wants to behave in the future, then translate that into experiential language.

Why: Behavior-based framing unlocks metaphor and emotion, yielding names that create experiences rather than descriptions.

"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."

Use small, cross-context creative teams instead of large brainstorms.

Deploy 2–3 teams of two people each; give them different briefs (real, disguised, or unrelated industry) to force lateral thinking.

Why: Diverse mental contexts reduce functional fixedness; most breakthrough names emerge from the “wrong” brief.

"Most of our names have come out of the second or third team… when people are working on what they know is not the real assignment, they are now free to make all kinds of mistakes."

Generate 1,000+ raw ideas before evaluating.

Suspend judgment, focus on quantity, then speculate on what each candidate could become through execution.

Why: Early critique kills novelty; volume increases the odds of finding legally and linguistically viable gems.

"Get to 1,000, 1,500 names and directions. Don't evaluate them… suspend judgment for a while, and let's do an exercise here where we take these 10 names that we think might work, and what are we going to do with it?"

Every letter carries sound-symbolic weight.

V is vibrant and alive; B signals reliability; Z adds noise and energy; X connotes speed and innovation.

Why: Sound symbolism taps universal cognitive responses, making names feel right across cultures.

"V, from our research… is the most alive and vibrant sound in the English alphabet… B, the sound of the letter B is one of the most reliable sounds… Z in Azure. That's a noisy letter."

Compound names multiply associations.

Two familiar words create a third mental image (wind + surf = fluid, dynamic coding), increasing memorability.

Why: Processing fluency plus layered meaning yields 1+1=3 effect; proven through Lexicon’s proprietary research.

"Compounds… are multipliers of associations… one plus one equals three."