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.

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.

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".

Borland CEO Del Yocam explained at the time that the new name was meant to evoke "integrating the enterprise".

Based on interviews with San Francisco Bay Area commuters, Lexicon determined that referring to e-mail in the name would induce stress 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 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.

[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.