This guy named BlackBerry, Febreze and Swiffer, here’s his exact 3-step naming formula
David Placek, a legendary brand naming strategist who created names like BlackBerry, Swiffer, Febreze, and Impossible Burger, reveals his systematic 3-step naming formula on this episode of My First Million. Placek argues that a right name compounds in value over time and can create asymmetric competitive advantage, demonstrating this with case studies where changing a name from "Pro Mop" to "Swiffer" transformed a product into a $5 billion brand. The episode explores how to balance surprising familiarity in naming, why most founders choose safe names by accident, and how to build a creative process that generates thousands of possibilities rather than settling for the first few ideas.
Key takeaways
- • A right name creates high-frequency leverage that compounds over time, potentially accounting for 90-120% of early market success in the first 12 months through retail distribution and consumer attention.
- • The three core functions of an effective name are: getting attention, being processing fluent (easy to pronounce but containing something understandable), and being surprisingly unexpected rather than comfortable or popular.
- • Avoid the "comfort trap" by embracing polarizing tension—names that create energy and debate within an organization are more likely to succeed than consensus-driven, invisible choices.
- • Effective naming requires generating 2,000+ concepts through a "treasure hunt" approach that combines Greek/Latin roots, mythology, aerodynamics, and seemingly irrelevant domains rather than limiting yourself to 50-100 ideas.
- • Two-person teams and individual contributors outperform group brainstorming sessions for creative work because brainstorming creates peer pressure and cascading evaluation that kills novel thinking.
- • Use "I wish we could..." language instead of rejection ("That's too expensive") when managing creatives, turning objections into problem-solving propositions that encourage iteration.
- • Names should feature power letters like P, K, B, D, and Z (plosives and fricatives) to convey speed and reliability, which can be measured through sound symbolism software.
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