Summary of "Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos"

Summary: Naming Expert David Classic on Creating Billion-Dollar Brand Names

Key Themes

The critical strategic importance of a brand name as a long-lasting asset in business.
The psychological and linguistic science behind naming.
A structured, research-driven, and creative process for developing distinctive, bold brand names.
Practical frameworks and actionable advice for founders, product teams, and marketers.

Frameworks, Processes, and Playbooks

1. Three-Step Naming Process: Identify → Invent → Implement

Identify

Focus on behavior and experience rather than traditional positioning or values.
Understand how the company currently behaves and how it wants to behave in the future, including how the marketplace interacts with it.
Conduct competitive landscape analysis to ensure distinctiveness and avoid imitation (which is “brand suicide”).
Develop a creative framework (a metaphorical “window”) to inspire breadth and depth in naming options rather than narrow objectives.

Invent

Use small, focused teams (2-3 people) rather than large brainstorming groups to generate ideas.
Employ multiple teams with different briefs (e.g., one team thinks they are naming a bicycle, another a non-technical product) to unlock creativity and reduce bias.
Leverage extensive linguistic and cognitive science research, especially sound symbolism—the emotional and experiential impact of letters and sounds.
Tap into a proprietary database of 18,000+ morphemes (smallest meaningful word units) to engineer names that evoke desired qualities (e.g., reliability, aliveness).
Generate a large volume of ideas (2,000–4,000) as “directions,” not ready-to-ship names, then sift through with legal and linguistic screening.

Implement

Assist clients with internal presentations and rationales to secure executive buy-in.
Develop prototypes by visualizing names on merchandise, ads, and mockups to help stakeholders imagine the brand experience.
Conduct consumer research about the imaginative impact of names, focusing on whether the name creates a predisposition to consider the product (not just familiarity or comfort).
Emphasize that the name is about market experience and behavior, not just internal preferences.

Key Metrics, KPIs, and Strategic Concepts

Cumulative Advantage: A distinctive name builds stronger bonds over time as customers repeatedly encounter it, enhancing brand equity.
Asymmetric Advantage: A bold, imaginative name gives a company an early marketplace advantage before launch, unlike descriptive names that blend in.
Polarization as a Signal: Team disagreement or tension about a name is a positive indicator of its strength and market impact. If everyone is comfortable with a name, it’s likely not bold or distinctive enough.
Processing Fluency: Names should be easy for the brain to process to encourage positive attention and memory retention. Avoid overly complex or complicated names.
Domain Names (.com): Less important than before; domain availability is now like an area code and should not drive the naming decision. If needed, prefixes/suffixes or new TLDs (.ai, etc.) can be used.

Concrete Examples and Case Studies

Sonos: Initially rejected for not sounding “entertainment-like,” but the palindrome nature and sound qualities made it distinctive and fitting for a sound-focused brand. Demonstrates the need to name for the marketplace, not just internal comfort.
Microsoft Azure: Chose a non-descriptive, bold name linked to “blue” and the sky, rather than a generic “cloud” term. Initially met with skepticism but became a $100B+ brand. Illustrates starting a story rather than making a statement.
Windsurf (formerly Kodium): An intangible AI coding product made tangible by naming it after a physical, dynamic experience (windsurfing). Compound names like Windsurf have multiplier effects on associations and imagery, countering client preference for shorter names.
BlackBerry: The letter “B” was chosen for its reliability and the compound nature of the name helped it stand out.
Pentium: Andy Grove valued the polarization around the name as a sign of energy and strength, leading to its selection over more descriptive but bland alternatives.

Actionable Recommendations for Founders and Teams

Diamond Framework Exercise for Naming

Draw a diamond and fill in these four corners:

Top: Win (Define what winning means for your company)
Right: What do we have to win? (Current assets or advantages)
Bottom: What do we need to win? (Resources, capabilities, including the right name)
Left: What do we have to say to win? (Messaging and experience to communicate)

Use this to shift focus from just words to the experience and behavior the name should evoke.

Additional recommendations:

Generate a very large volume of name ideas and directions (thousands) before filtering.
Suspend judgment initially; avoid over-evaluation early on.
Test names by asking external people:

“If a competitor launched with this name, what does that name do for you?” to understand imaginative impact rather than just opinion.
Look for polarization in team reactions as a sign of a strong name.
Be bold and embrace discomfort; comfort is the enemy of breakthrough naming.
For startups with limited resources, focus on the diamond exercise and broad idea generation, then iterate with the team.

Unique Organizational and Operational Insights

Lexicon Branding employs a global network of over 100 linguists in 76 countries, including PhDs, to evaluate cultural, political, and linguistic implications of names.
They invest heavily in proprietary linguistic research and cognitive science, funding studies and collaborating with top universities (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley).
Creative teams are composed of tenacious, curious, low-ego individuals often from writing, speechwriting, journalism, or agency backgrounds who can generate large volumes of ideas and persist through rejection.
The firm uses software tools to assist idea generation but maintains human creativity and linguistic expertise at the core.
Typical project timelines:
- 8 weeks for startups or mid-sized projects
- 3-4 months for large corporate projects with more stakeholders and legal clearance.

High-Level Business Execution Insights

A great name is a strategic asset that contributes to long-term brand equity and competitive advantage.
Naming is a mix of creativity, discipline, and science, requiring specialized expertise beyond typical marketing or design agencies.
Investing time and budget in naming is justified by the potential unlimited value of the right name.
Naming should be integrated with overall brand and market strategy, focusing on future behavior and experience rather than past positioning or descriptive labels.
Internal buy-in is critical; naming experts support clients with rationale, prototypes, and research to help win over conservative stakeholders.

Presenters and Sources

David Classic — Founder of Lexicon Branding, pioneer in brand naming, creator of iconic names including PowerBook, Pentium, BlackBerry, Swiffer, Impossible Burger, Vercel, Windsurf, Azure, Sonos.
Lenny Rachitsky — Podcast host and interviewer.

Additional mentions:

Andy Grove (Intel) — Insights on name polarization (Pentium).
GMA Roush (Vercel CEO) — Client testimonial on Lexicon’s scientific approach.
WorkOS and OneSchema — Sponsors briefly mentioned but outside core naming content.

This summary captures the core business, strategic, operational, and actionable insights on naming from the conversation with David Classic, emphasizing frameworks, processes, and examples valuable for founders, product teams, and brand strategists.