Blackberry, Swiffer, Dasani: the man behind some the most popular brand names

Sausalito is known in the Bay area for house boats and weekend getaways, while around the rest of the country it’s known mostly as a Pepperidge Farm cookie.

But it’s also the birthplace of Blackberry, Swiffer, Dasani, Pentium, and hundreds of other brand names coined by David Placek and his company, Lexicon Branding.  And this is serious work.

“What makes this job is, interestingly enough, not that it’s so much about being clever or creative, it’s that we’re really working with clients to solve a problem, to help them communicate something,“ says Placek

Founded in 1982, as one man with a unique idea.

“What makes a brand name so important is that it’s your permanent media,“ he says.

Today, the company employs dozens of people around the world.  Placek started his career at an ad agency in San Francisco but soon recognized that creating lasting, evocative names was good business.

Of “Dasani,“ Placek says, “We know that the way those individual letters sound and the little poem it makes conjures up or evokes all kinds of images in people’s minds.“

Even if it’s created out of thin air.

“It’s meaningless.  We made it up.  We made it up,“ he says.

Some names are amalgamations.

“We took the notion of this working on the fabric and we put it together…Febreze.“

And others helped enable the tech boom.

“It was just fortuitous.  It was the fifth generation of a processor chip,“ Placek says about coming up with the name, Pentium.

Conversations about projects are mapped out and ideas take as much power in this process as words.

Before they become products and are eventually cataloged.

The life work of a word smith, in an evolving communications landscape.

“Twenty years ago we were talking about print and today we’re talking about URLs, web searches, Google, Twitter, Facebook, banner advertising and that word has fit in all those environments and it has to say something of value that’s new,“ Placek says.

And, if you’re wondering does he get hit up by parents who need help with baby naming?

He says, “It’s not so much, ‘Name my baby,‘ but it is, ‘What do you think about this name?‘  And we have been approached for babies, for dogs, for boats, for barber shops, for a lot of things and you approach it with a smile and try to be as helpful as you can.“

Which seems to be something of a mantra.