The Klexaro Blog

The Science of
Brand Naming

A five-part series covering sound symbolism research, phonetic scoring, pronunciation engines, and how a Sound Print becomes a complete visual identity brief — all grounded in peer-reviewed linguistics.

Series — 5 posts
1
Brand Naming · The Problem
Brand Naming Has Two Unsolved Problems. Almost Nobody Addresses Both.
Most founders start where we did — asking AI for names, then realising there was no principled way to evaluate any of them. That frustration is the starting point.
8 min read →
2
Sound Symbolism · The Research
What Sound Symbolism Actually Says — And Why It Changes How You Name a Brand
The peer-reviewed foundation behind the framework — Klink (2000), Pathak et al., Nielsen & Rendall, and why Chanel scores 100% Luxury fit before a designer has touched a brief.
9 min read →
3
Scoring System · The Framework
How Klexaro Scores a Brand Name — Every Point, Explained
Four sequential steps. Strategic Fit (70%) and Technical Quality (30%). Every point awarded or deducted is transparent and traceable to a specific phonetic property.
10 min read →
4
Pronunciation Engine · The Engineering
The Pronunciation Engine — Why Accurate Phoneme Extraction Is Everything
CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (133,854 entries), 2,800+ brand names, and a 6MB on-device neural network for invented words. All on-device, all private.
8 min read →
5
Sound to Identity · The Output
From Sound Print to Brand Identity — The Orchestration Layer
The Sound Print doesn't just score a name — it contains enough structured data to brief an entire visual identity. Eight generation engines. Engineered AI prompts. The complete output chain.
9 min read →

This series is based on We Tried to Make Brand Naming Scientific. Here's What We Built. — the original Medium article by Klexaro Labs covering the full framework from first principles.

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Sound Print, Strategic Fit Score, collision detection across 2,800+ brands, engineered AI prompts. All analysis runs entirely on-device — your naming ideas stay private.

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