Branding and Naming your product: an evening with Name Guru, David Placek, CEO of Lexicon Branding
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Both seasoned branding professionals and start-up Founders and CEOs are invited to join us for an exciting evening with Branding and Name Guru, David Placek, CEO of Lexicon Branding and the man behind names such as Intel's Pentium, Blackberry, Subaru Outback, and Toyota Scion.
David will walk us through the art of naming a product: creative process, customer research, and R&D.
To Lexicon Branding, a great name is a "vessel" that allows you to tell a story, deliver an idea or make a promise. A great name uses semantics, sound symbolism, and phonetics to deliver a message and a personality all in less than a second. David will explain the steps required to create a new brand name as the foundation for all future marketing efforts.
David will walk us through the process:
- Background: competitive analysis, linguistic profiles, features, benefits, promises, and brand character development
- Creative: foreign experts input, briefings, linguist, and legal analysis
- Evaluation: marketing power, phonetic, legal, semantic, and sound
- Launch: trademarks, identity & design briefings, and announcements
Register Online
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Networking Reception & Registration. 7:00pm-8:00pm Program
Location: Wharton West, 101 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105
Cost: WCNC Members, members of affiliate clubs, and their accompanied guests: $20 per person. Non-member alumni and other guests: $40 per person. If available, $10 additional for tickets purchased after 12:00pm Tuesday, March 24, 2009.
David Placek
Founder and president of Lexicon Branding®, David has worked with numerous high-tech vendors during the past 26 years—Microsoft, Intel, Nokia, Apple and RIM, to name a few.
Examples of product names that have come out of Lexicon's four-month creative and linguistic processes can be found throughout the tech industry (Intel's Pentium, Centino, Celeron or Xeon and Apple's PowerBook), and many have crept into pop culture. Ever heard of the BlackBerry?
Most recently, Lexicon® worked with Microsoft on Azure, its new operating system. Automotive giant Toyota (the Scion car) as well as Procter & Gamble (Febreze spray) are two of the many well-known product brands that have been created in Lexicon's Sausalito, Calif., headquarters. Lexicon® works with 80 language experts around the world to ensure that no linguistic lapses occur with their clients' products.
But David Placek’s company has been involved with household names such as GM’s OnStar, Embassy Suites Hotels, KPMG’s BearingPoint, Subaru’s Outback, Forrester, and Baja models, Honda’s Ridgeline, VC firms Redpoint Ventures and OffRoad ventures, San Francisco’ Sony Metreon, Swiss Government’s Swissnex, and Coca Cola’s Dasani.
