Sound Advice on Brand Names

Bergh, Bruce G. Vanden; Collins, Janay; Schultz, Myrna; Adler, Keith

doi:10.1177/107769908406100415

Cited by 31 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…The role consonants play in brand names and their effects on product evaluations is an underresearched area. Past research has shown that brand names that begin with hard consonants (i.e., Kodak and Pepsi), elicit higher recognition (Vanden Bergh et al 1984), and occur more frequently than we would expect from the English lexicon (Schloss 1981). Although linguistic anthropologists have noted phonetic patterns for consonants (i.e., harder sounding consonants tend to represent harder, sharper objects than softer sounding consonants), these findings have not been directly tested on brand names.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

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A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgments

Yorkston¹,

Menon²

2004

J Consum Res

314

302

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In this article we examine a phenomenon known as sound symbolism, where the sound of a word conveys meanings. Specifically, brand names are composed of individual sounds called phonemes and we investigate how this phonetic structure of brand names affects a consumer's evaluation of products and their underlying attributes. We demonstrate that consumers use information they gather from phonemes in brand names to infer product attributes and to evaluate brands. We also demonstrate that the manner in which phonetic effects of brand names manifest is automatic in as much as it is uncontrollable, outside awareness and effortless.S ound symbolism, the linguistic process in which the sounds of a word provide cues about the word's meaning, is not a new phenomenon. Plato first described the effect in the dialogues of Cratylus, and authors throughout time have used the sounds in words to describe people (e.g., the miniature Lilliputians and the giant Brobdingnagians in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) and objects (e.g., the large, dangerous Bludgers, the big, round Quaffle, and the small, fast Golden Snitch in the Quidditch game in Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) represented by those words. When presented with fictitious or unfamiliar words, individuals consistently use sound symbolism to interpret meanings from the name about the referenced object (Jacobson and Waugh 1987;Sapir 1929). The effect is extremely well documented whether the tested individual's native language is English (Klink 2000(Klink , 2001, Chinese (Klank, Huang, and Johnson 1971;Lapolla 1994), or even Navajo (Sapir 1929). In fact, sound symbolism has been observed to exist in native languages in North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as more developed languages such as English, Finnish, French, German, Modern Greek, and Japanese (for a complete discussion of these examples see Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala 1994). *Eric Yorkston is assistant professor of marketing, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0443 (e-mail: yorkston@marshall .usc.edu). Geeta Menon is Harold MacDowell Faculty Fellow and associate professor of marketing, New York University, New York, NY 10012-1126 (e-mail: gmenon@stern.nyu.edu). This article is based on the doctoral dissertation of the first author under the supervision of the second. The authors thank members of the dissertation committee, Adamantios Gafos, Eric Greenleaf, and Vicki Morwitz, for their helpful comments during the different stages of this project. The authors acknowledge the data collection assistance provided by Sucharita Chandran, Andrea Morales, and Manoj Thomas. In addition, the authors are especially grateful to the JCR editors, Dawn Iacobucci and David Mick, the associate editor, and three reviewers for their constructive feedback during the review process.Past research on sound symbolism has focused on two aspects: the range of the effect (i.e., its universality; Huang, Pratoomaraj, and Johnson 1969) and the aspects of meaning it affects (Klink 2000(Kl...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

“…Since we were examining the symbolic differences between the [ä] and [i] sounds, we held all consonants in the words constant, avoiding hard consonants, since their rough sound symbolizes attributes that contradict those desired in our product category of ice cream (Schloss 1981;Vanden Bergh et al 1984).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgments

Yorkston¹,

Menon²

2004

J Consum Res

314

302

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This ‘stop consonants’ approach is used by Google, Coca‐Cola and Kindle to create a popping sound that makes the brand linguistically stronger (Bergh, Collins et al . 1984; Vanden Bergh, Adler et al . 1987).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing branding techniques on species common names to improve their fundraising profile for conservation

Díaz-Restrepo

Balcombe

Fraser

et al. 2021

Animal Conservation

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In the search for new ways to bring attention to the conservation of neglected species, marketing is increasingly recognised as offering new insights. Brand creation frameworks provide guidelines to create names or symbols for products that will differentiate them from the competition. In this paper, we examine if species common names that follow these guidelines can improve their fundraising potential. Using a novel choice experiment format that employs a budget allocation task, we evaluate if species common names influence donor preferences, where participants were given real money to donate to the species of their choosing. We model the data collected, which is fractional response data, using a Hierarchical Bayesian Dirichlet regression. Our results indicate that while all attributes are positively related to making a donation, Appeal and Familiarity coefficients are statistically significant but Name is not. There were also no statistically significant interactions between Name and any of the socio-economic variables. Our results on the importance of Appeal and Familiarity follow past research but contradict past research on the importance of common names, although the latter looked at common names in isolation. This suggests that species traits should not be tested in isolation when trying to understand the drivers of donations to wildlife conservation, as some traits that may appear important when tested separately become comparatively irrelevant when placed in a more realistic context where respondents have to consider multiple species traits. Future research into the influence of common names should investigate the possible impact of name sentiment as well as whether names with geographic references increase support from donors from those areas.

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“…No wonder, then, that such naming decisions are expected to be amongst the most important marketing decisions (Trout & Ries, 1981). Indeed, it has been noted that top brand names have different sound patterns than do general brand names (Bergh, Collins, Schultz, & Adler, 1984;Schloss, 1981;Van Doorn, Paton, & Spence, 2016). Brand naming strategies have also been shown to influence recall and preference (e.g., Lowrey, Shrum, & Dubitsky, 2003;Meyers-Levy, Louie, & Curren, 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tasting names: Systematic investigations of taste-speech sounds associations

Motoki

Saito

Park

et al. 2020

Food Quality and Preference

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Product names can be developed to effectively convey specific sensory attributes to the consumer. Most of previous research on crossmodal correspondences has shown that people selectively associate words (e.g., 'Maluma', 'Takete') with taste attributes. To provide practical insights for naming new products in the food industry, it is important to obtain a more nuanced understanding concerning those properties of speech sounds (i.e., vowels, consonants) influencing people's taste expectations. In this study, we investigated taste-speech sound correspondences by systematically manipulating the vowels and consonants comprising fictitious brand names. Based on the literature on crossmodal correspondences and sound symbolism, we investigated which vowels/consonants contribute more to the association between speech sounds and tastes (sweet/sour/salty/bitter). Across three experiments, we systematically varied vowels (front: [i][e], back: [a][u][o]), and affricate consonants (e.g., fricative: [f][s], stop: [p][t]) as well as voiced/voiceless consonants (e.g., voiced: [b][d], voiceless: [f][k]). Japanese participants were presented with brand names and had to evaluate the taste that they expected the product to have. The results revealed that: (1) front (back) vowels increased expected sweetness (bitterness); (2) fricative (stop) consonants increased expected sweetness (saltiness/bitterness), ( 3) voiceless (voiced) consonants increased expected sweetness/sourness (saltiness/bitterness). Moreover, consonants, which were pronounced first in the brand names, exerted a greater influence on expected taste than did the vowels. Taken together, these findings help advance theoretical foundations in sound-taste correspondences as well as provide practical contributions to the food practitioners to develop predictive product names.

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Sound Advice on Brand Names

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgments

A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgments

Testing branding techniques on species common names to improve their fundraising profile for conservation

Tasting names: Systematic investigations of taste-speech sounds associations

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