Lexicon Branding

Last updated

Lexicon Branding, Inc.
Company typePrivate
IndustryMarketing
Founded1982
FounderDavid Placek [1]
Headquarters
Sausalito, California [2]
,
United States
Key people
David Placek, CEO [1]
ServicesCorporate and brand name development
Website www.lexiconbranding.com

Lexicon Branding, Inc., is an American marketing firm founded in 1982 by David Placek. It focuses on selecting brand names for companies and products. The company devised the brand names Pentium, BlackBerry, PowerBook, Zune, Swiffer, Febreze, Subaru Outback and Forester, Toyota Scion, DeskJet, Dasani, OnStar, Embassy Suites Hotels and Metreon, among others.

Contents

History

David Placek founded Lexicon in 1982. Placek grew up in Santa Rosa, California, and graduated from UCLA with a degree in political science. He cites his work as press secretary in Warren Hearnes's unsuccessful 1976 campaign for U.S. Senate from Missouri as the experience that inspired him to go into marketing. Before starting Lexicon, he worked at the advertising agencies, Foote, Cone & Belding (where he became a devotee of Synectics) and an agency called S&O. [1]

As of October 1992, Lexicon had eight employees. [3] As of February 1998, it had 15 employees and did about 60% of its business in the technology sector. [4] An April 2004 article described the company as having 17 employees but said the "core creative team" was Placek and three others. [5] As of November 2008, Lexicon had 26 employees. [6]

As of June 2010 the company was headquartered in Sausalito, California, and had offices in London and New York City. [7]

Clients

Apple Inc. introduced its PowerBook in 1991. Lexicon crafted the name to combine the notions of performance ("Power") and portability ("Book"). [1] That same year, Lexicon came up with the name of Apple's Macintosh Quadra desktop computer, hoping to appeal to engineers with a name evoking technical terms like quadrant and quadriceps. [3]

In 1992, Intel was preparing to launch its fifth-generation x86-compatible microchip and needed a name it could trademark. Lexicon suggested it should end with the suffix -ium to connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element. [8] On a list of such names was "Pentium", which stood out to Placek because the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation of x86. Lexicon conducted market research and found that consumers would expect a hypothetical "Porsche Pentium" to be Porsche's highest-end car. [1] In 1998, Placek said Pentium was the best name his company had come up with. [4] The name was so successful that Intel named the chip's x86 successors after it: Pentium II, Pentium III, and so on. [9] Intel CEO Andy Grove said that Pentium became a more recognized brand than Intel itself and told The New Yorker in 2011 that the name "was one of our great success stories." [1]

In 1997, Sony's retail division hired Lexicon to name the first location, to be in downtown San Francisco, of a newly planned chain of "urban entertainment centers" designed to promote the Sony brand. Lexicon chose the name Metreon because they believed the metr- suffix evoked words like "metropolitan" and "meteor", the latter "suggesting something sophisticated, exciting and fast-moving". [10]

Intel hired Lexicon again in 1998 to name the Celeron and Xeon chips. The San Jose Mercury News described Lexicon's reasoning behind the former name: "Celer is Latin for swift. As in 'accelerate.' And 'on.' As in 'turned on.' Celeron is seven letters and three syllables, like Pentium. The 'Cel' of Celeron rhymes with 'tel' of Intel." [11] Placek told the San Francisco Chronicle said that the "X" of "Xeon" evokes "the next generation", "eon" refers to the long period of time, and the novelty of the name as a whole reflects the product's novelty. It also was supposed to recall "Pentium's Greek roots". [12]

In 1998, Lexicon came up with a new name for the company then known as Borland International: Inprise. Borland CEO Del Yocam explained at the time that the new name was meant to evoke "integrating the enterprise". [13] Analysts said Borland proved to be a stronger brand, and by 2000 the company had switched the name back. [14]

Research In Motion hired Lexicon in 1998 to name their new two-way pager. RIM came with several ideas, including EasyMail, MegaMail, and ProMail. Based on interviews with San Francisco Bay Area commuters, Lexicon determined that referring to e-mail in the name would induce stress in users. [1] Encouraging RIM to choose a name that larger competitors would never think of, Lexicon proposed BlackBerry. [6] The second B was capitalized because a linguistic study funded by Lexicon suggested that the letter "B" is, in The New Yorker 's words, "one of the most 'reliable' in any language". [1] [15] Lexicon research also suggested that repetition of the B would promote relaxation in users. [16]

In 2006, Microsoft approached Lexicon to find a name for its new portable media player to compete with Apple's iPod. Placek assigned three teams to come up with three names: one for the Microsoft player, one for a hypothetical Sony player, one for "a broadband experience for MTV." [17] He refused to tell the San Francisco Chronicle which team came up with "Zune", the name Microsoft chose. Placek said the name was chosen because the "Z" was perceived as fun and irreverent, it has one syllable compared with iPod's two, and it has a musical sound that rhymes with iTunes, Apple's media distribution platform. [17] Controversies arose due to similarities between the name and vulgar words in Hebrew [6] and Canadian French. [18] In 2008, Lexicon came up with the name of Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. [6]

Lexicon also christened Subaru's Outback and Forester vehicles, [19] Procter & Gamble's Swiffer cleaner, [20] [15] Levi Strauss & Co.'s Slates dress pants, [21] the Oldsmobile Alero, Embassy Suites Hotels, [22] Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet printer line, [3] Nestlé's Dibs confection, Colgate's Wisp miniature toothbrush, [23] the Coca-Cola Company's Dasani bottled water, [1] the Toyota Scion, [24] P&G's Febreze odor eliminator, and OnStar. [23]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intel</span> American multinational technology company

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue. Intel supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Intel also manufactures chipsets, network interface controllers, flash memory, graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and other devices related to communications and computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentium (original)</span> Intel microprocessor

The Pentium is a x86 microprocessor introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993. It is the first CPU using the Pentium brand. Considered the fifth generation in the 8086 compatible line of processors, its implementation and microarchitecture was internally called P5.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Celeron</span> Line of discontinued microprocessors made by Intel

Celeron is a discontinued series of low-end IA-32 and x86-64 computer microprocessor models targeted at low-cost personal computers, manufactured by Intel. The first Celeron-branded CPU was introduced on April 15, 1998, and was based on the Pentium II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentium II</span> Intel microprocessor

The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture ("P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors, the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first P6-generation core of the Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million transistors. However, its L2 cache subsystem was a downgrade when compared to the Pentium Pros. It is a single-core microprocessor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentium III</span> Line of desktop and mobile microprocessors produced by Intel

The Pentium III brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial processors were very similar to the earlier Pentium II-branded processors. The most notable differences were the addition of the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) instruction set, and the introduction of a controversial serial number embedded in the chip during manufacturing. The Pentium III is also a single-core processor.

Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xeon</span> Line of Intel server and workstation processors

Xeon is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same architecture as regular desktop-grade CPUs, but have advanced features such as support for error correction code (ECC) memory, higher core counts, more PCI Express lanes, support for larger amounts of RAM, larger cache memory and extra provision for enterprise-grade reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features responsible for handling hardware exceptions through the Machine Check Architecture (MCA). They are often capable of safely continuing execution where a normal processor cannot due to these extra RAS features, depending on the type and severity of the machine-check exception (MCE). Some also support multi-socket systems with two, four, or eight sockets through use of the Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) bus.

SSE2 is one of the Intel SIMD processor supplementary instruction sets introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. It extends the earlier SSE instruction set, and is intended to fully replace MMX. Intel extended SSE2 to create SSE3 in 2004. SSE2 added 144 new instructions to SSE, which has 70 instructions. Competing chip-maker AMD added support for SSE2 with the introduction of their Opteron and Athlon 64 ranges of AMD64 64-bit CPUs in 2003.

The NetBurst microarchitecture, called P68 inside Intel, was the successor to the P6 microarchitecture in the x86 family of central processing units (CPUs) made by Intel. The first CPU to use this architecture was the Willamette-core Pentium 4, released on November 20, 2000 and the first of the Pentium 4 CPUs; all subsequent Pentium 4 and Pentium D variants have also been based on NetBurst. In mid-2001, Intel released the Foster core, which was also based on NetBurst, thus switching the Xeon CPUs to the new architecture as well. Pentium 4-based Celeron CPUs also use the NetBurst architecture.

mP6 1998 microprocessor

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">P6 (microarchitecture)</span> Intel processor microarchitecture

The P6 microarchitecture is the sixth-generation Intel x86 microarchitecture, implemented by the Pentium Pro microprocessor that was introduced in November 1995. It is frequently referred to as i686. It was planned to be succeeded by the NetBurst microarchitecture used by the Pentium 4 in 2000, but was revived for the Pentium M line of microprocessors. The successor to the Pentium M variant of the P6 microarchitecture is the Core microarchitecture which in turn is also derived from P6.

The Intel Core microarchitecture is a multi-core processor microarchitecture launched by Intel in mid-2006. It is a major evolution over the Yonah, the previous iteration of the P6 microarchitecture series which started in 1995 with Pentium Pro. It also replaced the NetBurst microarchitecture, which suffered from high power consumption and heat intensity due to an inefficient pipeline designed for high clock rate. In early 2004 the new version of NetBurst (Prescott) needed very high power to reach the clocks it needed for competitive performance, making it unsuitable for the shift to dual/multi-core CPUs. On May 7, 2004 Intel confirmed the cancellation of the next NetBurst, Tejas and Jayhawk. Intel had been developing Merom, the 64-bit evolution of the Pentium M, since 2001, and decided to expand it to all market segments, replacing NetBurst in desktop computers and servers. It inherited from Pentium M the choice of a short and efficient pipeline, delivering superior performance despite not reaching the high clocks of NetBurst.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yonah (microprocessor)</span> Code name of Intels first generation 65 nm process CPU cores

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentium</span> Brand of discontinued microprocessors produced by Intel

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentium Dual-Core</span> Line of CPUs by Intel

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intel Atom</span> Microprocessor brand name by Intel

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Colapinto, John (October 3, 2011). "Famous names". The New Yorker . pp. 38–43. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  2. ↑ Secretary of State of California. "Business entity detail: Lexicon Branding, Inc". Archived from the original on April 2, 2010. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  3. 1 2 3 Beckett, Jamie (October 23, 1992). "Finding names in unusual places". San Francisco Chronicle .
  4. 1 2 Alexander, Steve (February 9, 1998). "In name only". Computerworld .
  5. ↑ Frankel, Alex (April 24, 2004). "The making of a brand name". National Post .
  6. 1 2 3 4 Wailgum, Thomas (November 11, 2008). "Tech's product name guru: meet the man who coined BlackBerry, Azure and more". CIO.com. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  7. ↑ Lexicon Branding, Inc. (June 15, 2010). "Lexicon Branding opens New York City office". Archived from the original on April 25, 2012. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  8. ↑ Burgess, John (October 20, 1992). "Intel's fifth-generation chip no longer goes by the numbers". The Washington Post .
  9. ↑ Morris, Evan (2004). From Altoids to Zima: the surprising stories behind 125 brand names . Simon & Schuster. p.  150 . Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  10. ↑ Lexicon Branding, Inc. (Jun 18, 1997). "Sony entertainment center to rise in San Francisco". PR Newswire.
  11. ↑ Cassidy, Mike (April 15, 1998). "Lexicon puts names on new technology". San Jose Mercury News .
  12. ↑ Fost, Dan (June 29, 1998). "Intel betting on 'Warrior Princess' chip". San Francisco Chronicle .
  13. ↑ Beckett, Jamie (April 30, 1998). "Borland sheds past with new name, game". San Francisco Chronicle .
  14. ↑ Wong, Wylie (November 8, 2000). "It's back to 'Borland' for troubled software maker". CNET . Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  15. 1 2 "Catchy product names that stick in memory". Christian Science Monitor. ISSN   0882-7729 . Retrieved January 26, 2024.
  16. ↑ Begley, Sharon (August 26, 2002). "What goes into a brand name? A letter at a time". The Wall Street Journal .
  17. 1 2 Fost, Dan (November 14, 2006). "Name That Zune". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  18. ↑ Canwest (September 15, 2006). "Microsoft dismisses music player's linguistic lapse". Canada.com. Archived from the original on July 29, 2012. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  19. ↑ "Ahead of the curve". CNN. February 22, 2001. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  20. ↑ Blair, Elizabeth (May 13, 2011). "With billions at stake, firms play name that mop". NPR . Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  21. ↑ Underwood, Elaine (August 19, 1996). "Levi's new dress code". Brandweek .
  22. ↑ Herz, JC (November 26, 1998). "A name so smooth, the product glides in". The New York Times . Retrieved October 15, 2011.
  23. 1 2 Heath, Dan; Heath, Chip (January 3, 2011). "How to pick the perfect brand name". Fast Company . Archived from the original on October 9, 2011. Retrieved October 12, 2011.
  24. ↑ "Lexicon's Latest Brand Naming Study Results: Spelling Matters". www.businesswire.com. March 22, 2011. Retrieved January 26, 2024.
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