Phonetic Symbolism and Brand Name Preference

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of phonetic symbolism on brand name preference. Participants indicated preference for fictitious brand names for particular products (or for products with particular attributes) from word pairs that differed only on vowel sound (e.g., front vs. back vowels, or vowel sounds associated with positive vs. negative concepts). Participants preferred brand names more when the attributes connoted by the vowel sounds (e.g., small, sharp) were positive for a product category (e.g., convertible, knife), but they preferred the same names less when the attributes connoted were negative for a product category (e.g., sport utility vehicle, hammer). However, words with negative vowel sounds were least preferred regardless of product category or attribute. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Does country of origin affect brand associations? The case of Italian brands in China

“…Many of them are based on experiments (Leclerc et al, 1994;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007;Maheswaran, 1994), so we use this methodology in order to verify our hypotheses.…”

“…In China, as in other newly developed countries, there is a large generational gap whereby new generations have different values and buying patterns, so studies aiming to analyse the relations among consumers' behaviour and international brands should consider these differences and focus their sample in specific generations in order to obtain homogeneous and unbiased answers. Moreover, the use of students in the sample for this type of experiment is well known and accepted in the marketing literature (Kocher, Czellar, & Usunier, 2006;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007;Maheswaran, 1994;Pan & Lehmann, 1993).…”

Insights into Consumer Preference of Foreign Brand Names: Reality or Myth?

“…Prior empirical studies have shown that pronunciation in terms of phonetic structure (Yorkston & Menon, 2004), the 'hardness' of consonants (Heath, Chatterjee, & France, 1990), and different vowel sounds (Lowrey & Shrum, 2007) effect consumer impressions of a brand name. In their study, LeClerc et al (1994) stated that French pronunciation of a brand name effects hedonic perceptions of products.…”

Brand Naming: Sound Symbolism, Brand Preference and Brand Performance

“…Analyzing what kind of processes and factors could affect brand names evaluation, marketers and social psychologists have been focused, particularly, on five factors as follows: personalizing the brand (Wansink, Painter, & van Ittersum, 2001), fluency of words/brand names (Alter & Daniel Oppenheimer, 2006); name-letter effect (Brendl, Chattopadhyay, Pelham, & Carvallo, 2005;Nuttin, 1985); alpha-numeric brand names (Gunasti and Ross, 2010) and sound symbolism (Wu, Klink & Guo, 2013;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007;Yorkston & Menon, 2004;Klink, 2001). We will review below the studies regarding this topics.…”

“…Sound Symbolism -the nonarbitrary relation between a sound of a word and its meaning -has been widely recognized as an important factor in how individuals infer specific meaning from unfamiliar brand names (Wu, Klink & Guo, 2013;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007;Klink, 2001). A brand name is composed of sounds called phonemes.…”