Mixed messages in brand names: Separating the impacts of letter shape from sound symbolism

Abstract

Recent work suggests that sound symbolism in brand names conveys marketing-relevant messages. However, if the customer sees a brand name rather than hears it, visual characteristics of the letters may convey messages of their own. These may conflict with or reinforce the message conveyed by sound symbolism of the name. Study 1 replicates the essence of the sound symbolism effect claimed in recent work. Study 2 shows that the visual characteristics of letters provide a plausible alternative explanation of these findings. Study 3 manipulates the visual characteristics in the brand name letters and reverses the previously found direction of sound symbolism effects. The findings suggest that powerful visual messages are present in brand names and that because of confounding, the contribution sound symbolism makes to the brand name may not always act as thought. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.When people see a brand name, many different specialized processes are activated in the brain, operating automatically and semi-autonomously (Gontijo et al., 2002;McClure et al., 2004;Shiv et al., 2005). It is useful to think of brand names being designed to broadcast messages on several different channels simultaneously. These include not only dictionary-like meanings and associations of the name (e.g., that IKEA is a Swedish retailer of furniture; that Budweiser is Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 28 an American beer), but also more subtle impressions left by color, shape, and sound. Though a name may broadcast on several channels, does it communicate on them, in the sense that messages in the separate channels are registered by the consumer, though not necessarily fully consciously, to affect the final overall meaning of the name? Conversely, are all messages that are received by the consumer actually intended to be broadcast, or can messages be inadvertently communicated?In reading a brand name, two prominent channels are its visual form and its sound. Because visual and auditory pathways in the brain are anatomically separate, the prima facie assumption is that separate channels should exist for the sound and visual form of a brand name, each making distinct and independent contributions to the overall message. But what are the a priori expectations of their relative strengths of contribution? On the one hand one might anticipate the visual side to dominate. Koch (2004Koch ( , p. 1108, for instance, notes that "humans are visual creatures . . . reflected in the large amount of brain tissue that is dedicated to the analysis of images and in the importance of seeing in daily life." On the other hand, language is an auditory process, which reading and writing must fit to, rather than vice versa. Children first learning to read (English) translate vision into sound into meaning using a laborious sounding-out strategy (phonics). As expertise develops, additional mechanisms may assist in reading, such as holistic word reading, but they never come to dominate phonics (Pelli & Tillman, 2007). Which modality is likely to exert the...

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