Brand Naming in 2026: AI, Trademarks, and What’s Next with Lexicon’s David Placek

Hey, everyone. This is Bill Cany, co-founder and CEO of Fogus Lab, a global B2B branding agency. I'm back with another episode of In Conversation. Fun fact, recorded a similar episode four years ago with the same person. His name is David Plastic. He is the founder of Lexicon, the premier naming agency in the world. A lot of change in four years with the introduction of AI, the challenges of trademarking with the volume of applications and business development. It was time to talk about naming again. So, David and I got back together and we sat down for this conversation to cover what is new and different in the naming world. What does it look like these days to try to trademark a name? How long does that take? Then, generally speaking, what does the naming process look like when working with Lexicon? Ways to identify if you are in need of a name change. And also, when you don't need a name change, when a name is not going to particularly solve the business problems. We talk about all of that and more. David is a gem of a human. You're going to love this conversation if you're curious about brand naming. This is the episode for you. Enjoy. All right, David. We're back at it. Welcome back to the show. I know you and I have seen each other multiple times since then. You've become a great friend. But we recorded four years ago that video that you and I recorded very casually without much of a plan. Yes. Has 16,000 views, 383 thumbs up is on YouTube. Not a single thumbs down. Hey, it must be our looks. We're doing something right. And we both have recently even had a client call as a result of somebody seeing this video about naming, which is why we're back to do it again. We have better cameras now. Greyer, Greyer beards. But more knowledge, more experience. And yeah, I'm excited to talk about the world of naming with you. If you want to just take a minute, maybe introduce yourself and tell people who you are and what the hell you do. Be my pleasure. I'm David Plastic. I'm the founder and creative director of Lexicon branding. A firm that is totally devoted to the development of brand names for strategic products and services. Our headquarters are in Sossaleo, California. And we have an office in Amsterdam in the Netherlands for our European business. And some pretty notable names. The people that are watching for the first time that don't know anything about you are going to be looking in the background going like, oh, Swiffer and Blackberries hiding behind you. Got Sonos. You've got to ask your hiding over there in the corner. Really, really great work. I think people are wowed when they first come across you. I suspect and they see the names that you've worked on. So props to you. Well, thank you. And we've been very fortunate. We've worked with some marvelous clients on some truly exciting products. One of the great things about this company is we see the future. Not every week, but honestly every three weeks someone walks through our doors with something that we know is going to change the world a little bit or a lot. And we certainly have been seeing that in the last couple of years as AI products, services and technologies have come into fruition. Yeah, I bet. I bet as we feel that a little bit, but we're even more downstream from you. It's pretty interesting and unique position to be in where you're seeing and hearing about the latest and greatest things that are coming into the market. It is. And it comes from all different areas. You know, it can be something in automotive. It can be something in aerospace. And more often than not now, it's something to do with artificial intelligence. Yeah. And tell me how long you've been doing this again? Remind me is a 40 something years. We're into our fourth decade year. So so yeah. Congrats. And very, you know, when you look at statistics on small businesses, which is what we are, it's very rare for a small business to move through four decades. Congrats. Congrats on the four decades. The world needs naming no matter what state it's in. Doesn't matter if it's early internet before the internet after the internet AI, all these things. Names are necessary. You want to give me maybe a quick highlight on how that game has changed over maybe the past 40 years. Yes, I'm happy to do that. When I started this firm, it was really a creative challenge for us. It was a challenge of what process is doing need, what what knowledge do we need to make us successful? Success here is defined by helping our companies grow. Naming has evolved to be much more of a strategic endeavor at this point in time. And the reasons for that, yeah, see, it's still creative. I should say I should back up for that. But the reason why it's strategic is names just have to do more. They have to work harder and do more in today's very complex, very competitive, global digital world. I know that's a mouthful. But think about those words that I've just said. So, so a name now, let's go back just three decades ago. We weren't so worried about something being instantly global because three decades ago, things weren't instantly global. Sure. It was beginning to to head in that direction. So we've had to develop a whole linguistic side in our business. There's way more competition. And so we like to describe consumers across any any audience, any segment, doctors, lawyers, B2B, they're dramatically distracted. And even four decades ago, it was hard to get people's attention. Now it's much harder to do that. And the challenge is in a very short period of time to not only get their attention, but move them to what I call a predisposition to consider. So you have just a few seconds to do that. And that means name has to be distinctive. It has to say something new. We call it or describe it as "notework." And I always use the example here. If you're in a meeting, you know, people are talking around the table and everyone's well, so in a sense, something gets your attention. And you might describe that. That was a note where the idea I hadn't thought about that before. I haven't seen this on the shelves. I haven't seen this concept in the marketplace. And all that is really vital to success. There's one other thing and then I'll stop and see if you have questions. Because we have this horizon here of looking at how brands have done and how they progress from launch over, you know, the first couple of years. Going back a few decades, companies and investors were much more tolerant of a brand. And I'll use the phrase "bumping along" in the marketplace and investing in reposition. Now, I see far less tolerance for that. You really have to get it right. You have to come out of the gates really strong. You have to really do a good launch. You have to get employee commitment to the new brand. And all that takes more time and more resources than many of our clients are aware of. And a lot of what we do in the early stages, coach people about, "Hey, you need more staff to do this." We would be contract staff for a short period of time. But the idea that a CMO and a couple of assistance and a brand manager can do a major launch, yeah, those days are pretty much gone. Yeah, you're right. Because that whole narrative needs to be controlled. You can't just, again, throw it out there and let it boom, belong. There's no tolerance for that. The market is very opinionated, right? It has high expectations. It is also wildly distracted, you know, all these things. Yeah, I could see how the game is harder now as a human agency. But you're still doing it. You're doing it successfully. Where is the biggest challenge now is AI and the speed of business building, creating what is it now? Just more noise, harder to trademark. These types of challenges. Well, you brought up trademark. So let's talk about that for a moment. That is for us. And for our clients, one of the big hurdles for this. And I'll just give you a statistic that I'm familiar with. When I started Lexicom, some of the viewers or listeners will know that trademark are divided into classes. And there's 45 of them. And in technology, that's class 9. In US class 9, when I started, so going back four decades, there was something less than I think, I think it, you know, number was 23,000 registered trademarks in the USA. Right? Today, as we sit here, there are probably well over 2 million trademarks in the USA. Wow. Okay. Now, I mean, think about addiction. What addiction, fully loaded dictionary has probably 500,000 words in it, right? Uh-huh. And so now if you're, if you're an apple, and you have a physical device, but you have also have software in it. So we're adding a class and that software probably does communication things. So now you're adding another class, but a company like Apple doesn't just work in the US. So when we're searching for a company like that, we're usually searching about 35 markets. And so the number just goes up and up and up. Excellent. And then surely. Yes. Yes. Thank you for sharing that stat. You know, when I was watching the video that we recorded four years ago, something you said in there was this challenge, but this was pre AI. That feels kind of weird to say. This thing is moving so fast. We had that conversation. Sure, there were AI companies, but they were not on the public radar. They were not even on my radar at all. We weren't working with any of those types of organizations. You know, you'd already mentioned how noisy the trademarking process was and just like landing on a name that you can solidify. And I'm in you basically in that video you said in three to four years, it's going to be nearly impossible. It's exactly what you said. I watched it not that long ago. Is this starting to feel impossible? Every name you come up with just just bam, bam, bam, bam. We're definitely at an approaching, you know, an inflection point here of difficulty. And one of the things we're trying to do is move clients from an old model of one project at a time and working with them to look at the long-term horizon and begin naming and clearance now for a project that might be three years out from full development. Got it. And one of the advantages that gives is gives us in the client in particular is that you have more time to negotiate with someone who might have the ownership on a mark, but maybe it's a smaller company and you can work out a licensing agreement. If someone says, "Hey, we got a launch in eight weeks, you're not going to have time to negotiate." And so that's what we're trying to do. And we're finding that with us at clients are becoming more receptive to that kind of a model. And it can be done in different ways. It can be informal, it can be formal, but if the spirit of it is, let's start processes earlier. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I hadn't considered that at all. Is there a world that I just thought of this while you were talking? Are there people that create names and squat on them? You know, the word squatting? Like the same way people buy URLs? Very familiar. Yes. Now that's been going on for a long time with URLs. The only good news there is the price of URLs has gone down because there are so many options you have. You know, you can do that. I dot b is all those different things. And in our world, our attitude is the dot com is nice to have, but you can have it by putting a word in front or in back of the name. Absolutely. Yeah. Get get alpha dot com. The URLs have become like telephone numbers or area code. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Whether I'm in 415 or 602 really makes no difference to you. Yeah. No, not at all. So we couldn't get focus love dot com. And for a long time, we have focus of lc dot com, which we all hated because even our international clients are like, what does the LLC? What does that even mean? Now we have focus on dot agency because that's an extension that we can add and have that as URL. And I quite like that. I like it as much as focus.com. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just curious if like, people actually go out there and try to create a name, but they would have to be able to have a business built to be able to squat on the name, never mind the URL. That's correct. Now you know, applying their clients will, you know, I, I, I, I, in quotes squat on names that you can file on in the US three names for a single project, right? I'm in its fair because you're doing research, you know, you're doing position, but then you're supposed to abandon two of those when you go out. But oh, I see. But there are clients who squat on names just to the kind of the letter of the law, thinking that, well, now we can use that for another wine or another, you know, I see car or something like that. Yeah. I like the spirit of the law, but not technically the law. Okay. Very interesting. Yeah. This is why we do these conversations. You know all the inside stuff that we're all curious about. I think we should probably just have a brief conversation on information overload because that's why it comes in consumers now can get so much information, not necessarily reliable information, but on products and services. So that means they have more stuff coming at them. And on the other side, clients, companies can use AI to market to you more aggressively, understand you more. Sure. And so I think that's overload. Yeah. More things coming at you. You have more information to process. And what that results in, I'm not sure, but it's a factor in there. And I think that at some point will reach an inflection point where consumers will start disconnecting from services and people they follow and things like that. You know, it's so easy to put out newsletters or, you know, like what we're doing now, podcast that you the audiences will be inundated. There'll be so much. Too much. Yeah. Only the good content we'll cut through. Hopefully we're somewhere on that side of the spectrum. I hope so. Yeah. That's the goal. You want to help the viewers and listeners understand the most common reasons why a company would rename. Like what's the 85% the most common and I'll say that legitimate reason to do this is that your business model has changed. You started out, you know, making buggy whips and now you're making wagons, right? Is it to use? Yeah. And so that that name that you had before is slowing you down. Sometimes it slows you down and you can kind of talk yourself into keeping it. Other times, it's just really going to drag you to the point where you're not going to be successful. But combined with that, like, okay, I think I think this name is not working. You also have to have a mission going forward that says we're changing our name and because of A, B and C, so those are kind of the logical reasons, but the emotional reasons for the consumer, the customer have to be there. This is good for you because now company X is going to be doing more of this less of that and creating products that are to your advantage. The consumer out there wants to know what's in it for me. And sure. Yeah. And that's the only way that we've seen that name changes are successful when there's an articulation of how the marketplace will be better off. Yeah. Huge plus one to that. We kind of touched on that earlier in the conversation, which is CMO and having a group of people around them and a story and a narrative to build off of when that actually goes to market the name, the new identity, all that stuff. I couldn't agree more. It's no different for the work that we do. When that finally hits the market for the first time, there has to be a supporting story there. It can't just be, oh, everything's changed and then everyone's back to work. You're just throwing money down down the drain, I think. Sure. Yeah. We'll do that. Yeah. So, and you know, there's one other, there was a couple, always a couple of reasons, but you might have been a US centric company and now through digital improvements and innovations, you are now more global and people are just stumbling on your name because of the way it's structured. That's the legitimate reason to say, hey, let's change the name and let's tell people what the exciting emotional message is. Yeah. So essentially what you're saying is there has to be some deep core catalyst driver for a name change and not a name change is not something to maybe do flippantly just because you feel like it's going to, I don't know, because the company needs a shakeup for lack of a better word. Not a reason to do that. It's hard to change your name whether you're a startup with 30 people or you're a huge company with 5,000 people. It's all the same mechanics and you have to be thoughtful, you have to be deliberate. It takes time. Obviously more money if you have 5,000 employees and lots of customers and less if you're 30 employees and maybe you have 5,000 customers. So, so it's different, but, but it's still difficult. It's still time consuming and you know, I'll use the word it can be distracting if you don't have the resources and you might lose momentum that you worked hard to gain. Yeah. Do you find that? No, and we can tread lightly here because I do as well. I never want to paint customers ever in a bad light. We're always grateful for customers. But do you find that customers often misunderstand maybe the level of effort that will go into the naming process? They enter the project going like, oh yeah, we need a new name by the time they get to them. They're like, wow, that was harder than I thought it was going to be. Yes. And it's understandable really because most people have never changed a name or developed a new name. Right. And you think of names. It's a word, you know, how difficult can it be? So we completely understand that. So that's why we spend some of our time just in that coaching phase. So, there's stages we have to go through trademark and how that's done is very few clients know anything about that. And really our app not to appreciate the difficulty of that. It's I use the let the comparison of what I talk to our accountant around tax time and he starts rambling on about this legislation and how this was changed. I just say, you know, I don't really need to know it. I just tell me what I owe or tell me where I'm getting back. Yeah. Yeah. And so I understand it. But that that's one thing that we really take time to do is for our clients to understand the trademark. process, what we do, what their council needs to do. We ask them to check on their bandwidth, you know, check on their experience. And then, you know, you have to have an outside council, and a good outside council with trademark experience. And so all that's new to our clients. And we, you know, we have to be patient. It's just something that they haven't done. Yeah, for sure. Understood, right? We operate the same as you do, no surprise, because we're so culturally kind of similar, which is idea of like empathizing with the client's position. Yes, we do this a hundred times. We do it 700 times. This is their first time or their second time. Yes, brandy new for them. And in order, we're usually the only time in their life that they'll do this. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. They find out that it is much harder than they thought. Yeah. There is some fun to it. It is exciting, but it's a lot of hard work. We had a wonderful client about five years ago with food at the end of it. She said, listen, this has been great. I love working with you guys, but I never want to have a naming project again. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that the truth? The same for visual identity and approval. I mean, all these things. Yeah. Well, people trying to find the right words for their e-purpose and their mission statements and then trying to find like, you know, the right logo. These are really challenging problems. Even though at the end, when you see it, it might be, oh, surely it wasn't all that hard. Yeah. Easy. Yeah. Be in the trenches of that. Now, I know you can't give me exact, but I'm curious. So, I'm going to ask it even for my own curiosity, what's the fastest a trademark generally goes through or takes and what's the longest? Well, it used to be a lot, a lot shorter to things that happen there. I think with COVID, you know, staff reductions there, people working at home, I think things have slowed down in the system. And then there are so many more trademark applications to be processed. Yeah. I don't know if they're overwhelmed, but they're very, very busy. So, to answer your question, by the time you file an application for you to be notified that you actually have that circle R is if it passes through, you know, these review cycles is about a nine-month period issue. You're lucky. Okay. So, that's on the, that's on the quick side then. That's on the quick side. Yeah. The examiners, you know, it goes into an examiner. They may pick up the phone and call you or write you back saying, you know, I don't understand this or I don't, this isn't clear. You have to better explain this and then that's another month or two months, right? Yeah. So now. And then sometimes at the end of that, you get the rejection letter and you're like, ah, shit, we're kind of back to, is it zero or is it back to another name that maybe that was bundled in that, I guess? Well, yeah, if you, if you file for three names, you're going to file three separate applications. So, you, if one was rejected, you would still have them go. Rejections usually come earlier than that, right? The nine months. Okay. So, you're good. And then there, there is a process in, in the application, kind of continual where your mark is cleared by the examiner and it's, this is the phrase, it's published for opposition. And this is where other people who own that mark or a very similar mark can oppose it. Got it. That's posted for, I believe it is 60 days. And at the end of that period, if no one's opposed it, you're in very good shape to get a, get the register trademark. It doesn't mean that after you get that someone can, you know, file a suit against you. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's always a very good day when you have, you've been filed for opposition or published, sorry, for opposition. And then most people put on their calendar, okay, at the end of that time, then people have a little celebration, a little bit of relief more than sell. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's kind of one of these big, send it into the void. Hope you get back what you're hoping to get back kind of moments where in the project, it's just the two parties working together to resolve the, do we like this? Do we like that? Do we like that? That's kind of a big question mark, send it over the fence, wish for the best. Yeah. Yeah. And you use the word void. I think it's an app description of the trademark. That's into the void. All right. Are there instances of companies coming to you saying, Hey, we're building this thing. We get this idea or we need to change our name because of X and you realize they're wrong. They do not need to change their name. That's actually not a valid reason. Yes. It's not a frequent occurrence for us, but it's not, candidly, it's not infrequent. In that first part of the engagement before we're really engaged is tell us about what you want to solve here, what's the opportunity? Why are you considering the name change? And we want to work with people who we feel they really do need an agency and they're committed to it. Right. So we really try to ask those questions on a very forthright way. And when we hear from a company and a client team, well, you know, three of us really don't want to change our name. And three of us really do. Yeah. Yeah. That's when I say, Hey, let's talk about that because right away you're going to run into that kind of resistance. And we listen carefully to the arguments and, you know, we either side on one side or the other, but often, you know, or sometimes not, you know, not often. We will withdraw from that and saying, I think you need to think this through and the six of you agree to change the name. Yeah. The projects are already hard enough, right? If you have stakeholders in there that don't think they even need it. Oh, man, that's that's quite the wedge to start a project. Yes. That's very true. Yeah. Yeah. All right, David, let's we've talked a lot about naming, but I think it'll be really helpful for the viewers and the listeners to really talk about like the day to day, the week to week, which is how we function. And I think very similar to you. What let's talk about what it really looks like week to week in the naming process. So let's now presume they understand the value of a name. They actually need it. And they're ready and they're all engaged. Can you give us kind of a sample of what that looks like when they reach out to you onboarding, deliverables, these types of things? Yeah. We really have we try to make it simple. We have really three steps in our process. And of course, those steps have details, but the first step is to identify. Second step is in vent, right? Create. And the third is implement. And I'll I'll just kind of take a few of those really quickly on the first stage, identify our mission is not just to get a good name for a client. It's is to give them the right name, right? And that right name for us is as a word, it could be a real word. It could be a calling word like a codec or a or a a nvm behind me or a pentium. But it has certain distinctive advantages in the marketplace so that we we love to use the word asymmetric advantage for work. So so we spend time with the client team to talk about what are your opportunities and your problems. But mostly we spend time talking about their future. And we really focus on behavior. And behavior for us is bidirectional. In other words, the company work behaves towards the marketplace a little certain way. And their customers behave towards them is certainly. And it's really interesting to have that conversation about how do you want to behave in the marketplace. And how do you want your customers to behave about this, right? When I put on a t-shirt with a Nike swoop, how do I want to feel? How do I want to behave? Right? How do you want that customer to do that? Because we name actually for behavior, we name for the future. Not for now. We want to know about problems or challenges and the competition because the name has to be more memorable and it has to have something original or noteworthy as we talked about before to it. So that space one that ends up in a small document not long. It says, you know, given what we've heard, here's the framework and we use we don't use the word objectives because when you hear objectives, you want them to be very very tight. And we don't want tight objectives. We want a framework to begin development because we're going to share a number of names with our clients. So that space one, phase two then, and that's working with the customers. And sometimes depending on how complicated complex the marketplace is, that might be two or three meetings. Sometimes it's one meeting, right? Okay. Next phase, we really go away. We're working here in small teams. We're using our linguists. The linguists play a role here to help us identify sounds and word parts technically called morphines, but we can just talk about prechixes and suffixes and infixes. And so that's about a three week turn because we're going to either present with one intense creative cycle or two intense creative cycles. Okay. And then we're presenting names to our clients. And we're talking about, you know, what makes them memorable. We're talking about things like processing fluency. We're comparing it to their competition. We're talking about their future and how this name plays that role in it. And they're reacting. We ask, you know, advice is let's not do, I like it, I don't like it. Let's not reject anything today. Let's think about how we could use these tools because in the end, the name is just a tool that that's all sure. Yeah. And it has nothing to do with the people selecting the name has to do with the marketplace and that behavior that we've talked about. Yeah, we'll listen to them though, and we'll learn from that name, stimulate responses. It's a catalyst and then we do it again. While that's going on, our trademark team here, which now has three paralegals and a trademark attorney will anything we are interested in will go into them for analysis. And it's very rigorous analysis here. We don't just do, you know, inexpensive knockout searches. And so when we're presenting to clients, we're showing them names that are maybe 50% through the process. Okay. Yeah. Then we go. So now we had identify and vent and now implement. This is where we're helping clients make those selections. We have a program here that we call performance profiles where we're using our linguists around the world and we have a hundred and seven linguists under contract to us to profile those names in their languages. And we now have a lot of small language model. Actually, we have seven of them now for our insights from research, previous research investments that we've made and linguistic research that we've done. And we use AI to take a small language models and profile these names for us. Okay. Yeah. But what we're always trying to do is take out some of the subjectiveness and naming and put in sort of strategic objectivity to these things. And so we're doing that kind of work on a shorter list of names. We also have a research team here about 50% of our projects will do research on almost all corporate names will do will have research. And so we're going to start up for startups, you know, where they're moving fast. And I think entrepreneurs have more confidence smaller boards, those types of things that they are so need research. And then the final stage here is what we call the bridge to a visual identity firm will say this is this is the process we've been on. This is what we've learned. And this is the name here are the assets and liabilities of the name. And if we've done research, that can be, you know, a two hour briefing session with them. How many people on the client side generally are joining those kind of review meetings on your side where you're reviewing the names is a small group. They try to jam too many people in there. What's what's the best size? Yeah, the best size is a smaller group. You know, politics does enter into this with a larger organization. Let's think about the process. We want to always start with a small group of three or four people. The next group might be a senior marketing team. And and see sweet. So maybe that's six or eight people. We want those people to know what that creative framework is. So we're not walking into a room saying, hey, we're going to show us some names today. And when that happens and it does, you know, we get things like, well, why are we naming you guys doing here. And then finally, there's who's going to present to the board, who's going to present to the C suite if we're not doing that. And so. So we cover that early on because that's where names you get sent back and then money and time is wasted. Yeah. Okay. Understood. Before we close out, I want to ask you if there's anything else you think we need to hit more clearly right on the nose. Well, I can a couple of things. One, I really want to emphasize that the role of a brand name is larger than it ever has been before. And I think it will increase in its importance and its strategic values. And so it's not so much like put more money into it, although it's going to take more money, put more time into it. We do get notes from people saying, you know, hey, I work with you, you know, 10 years ago, and it was great. And right now, I don't have any money, but we have generated names and we generated 15 names. And then can you look at these and by the way, you know, occasionally we do that, but usually I will say, you got to do more than 50 names. You know, okay, quantity does lead to quality here. It really does. So, but again, I can't emphasize enough the changing role of brand names in the marketplace that they are strategic now. And I think their strategic importance will increase. And so hopefully companies will get ahead of that curve, right. Because it's almost, it's almost like the proverbial hockey curve. Yeah. I think the other thing that we face all the time with companies is a naming process. You really want to lead it. You don't want to manage it. You want to give people the freedom, the encouragement. You want to push people along. You want to be very tolerant. And that increases the likelihood of coming out with a name like a swiffer or a Fabrice or you know, elucid motors. In all those cases, we have people who are more on that. We're going to help you lead this lexicon. We're not going to provide oversight and management. Yeah. Okay. I think would be the same thing in any creative. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Like we definitely want to show up in a way we are helping and leading the client. Not just, I guess creating a sandbox for them to kind of explore and find a solution in themselves. It's ultimately not what they're hiring anyways, right. They're hiring you. They're hiring us. They're looking for experts. Because they don't know about the process and they don't know what they should be nervous about excited about in different about these types of things. Yeah. The reality is for us and for companies who work with none of these names that are behind my wall here and meant so many of them are, you know, billion dollar brands. It's hard to look at a name and say that's it. You know, it's much the tendency and it's a human tendency is to figure out what's wrong with it. Right. And so we just have to work with that. And that's why with our, you know, our performance profiles and our linguistic and cognitive science knowledge. We put in that objective to what is essentially a subjective business, you know, which is why people benefit and often pay up to work with companies like yours and mine. Because we're going to help them through that subjective, biased, challenging part of a project like it doesn't sound like anything to me yet. I don't like that logo. That doesn't mean anything to me yet. And we're in and you and I are telling them that's okay. Yeah. We have two different companies, but both of us have processes that we put together so that you can come in and point a and walk out at point Z. Yeah. With content and with a tool that's going to help them grow, whether it's visual or a word. Yeah. That's a great thing to offer. All right. Well, why don't you wrap us up with if you are speaking to a founder tomorrow, which I'm sure you will Saturday. So not tomorrow. Oh, no, speaking with the founder of a startup or even a CMO of a series B series C company that is has a legitimate reason to go through and rename their organization. What's the one thing you would tell them they need to do? What's the one thing they got to get right? If you're only allowed to tell them one tip. Well, that's a great question. The first thing that comes to my mind as a tip for that person on Monday is to say, sit down and write what you announcement will be to your employees about this new name. Our new name X is is what is going to take us in the future because it does a B and C. And I said that that will be the start of a good conversation. That would be my first tip. I've done a lot of interviews now generally around branding and identity and rebrands not a lot on naming. But that's the first time I've heard anybody express that as like a starting point tip. And I want to commend you for that. I think that's so different. It is a really valuable thought exercise for that founder slash CMO. The same thing would be true if they were going to go through a rebrand. Yes, pretend like you're at the end of that. And now you're expressing this to the organization because I will get you not only ahead of that need. But it's going to help you enter this project with the clear vision of like what you're trying to get at the end. You guys can increase traffic and conversions on a website. But what's the push? What's the mission? What's the galvanizing kind of hurrah at the end that you want to deliver starting with that novel idea, sir. Look at you. Look at you. You know, it's it's imagine the end and work backwards. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I'm really glad I asked you that. You sure. Yeah. Yeah. It was good. It was a great question. It really was. [BLANK_AUDIO] glad I had a good answer. I was glad. You were supposed to do it. Right. Well, I know it would be a pleasure. It was a pleasure. Until the next time, until I see you in the city and we have dinner again, have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for joining the show, David. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you, my friend. Okay, David. Yes. Pleasure. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]