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...
We demonstrate the differential effects of framing health hazards as occurring every day versus every year, two reference periods that objectively refer to the present but subjectively seem different. Through three studies, we show that every day framing makes risks appear more proximal and concrete than every year framing, resulting in increased self-risk perceptions, intentions to exercise precautionary behavior, concern and anxiety about the hazard, and effectiveness of risk communication. Across different health domains, we show that, while temporal frames moderate self-positivity biases (study 1), difficulty of preventive behaviors (study 2) and outcome valence (study 3) moderate temporal framing effects.Four hundred and forty thousand Americans succumb each year to the deadly effects of tobacco smoke. (Brody 2001) What will it take to get the 3,000 teenagers who each day start smoking to resist this deadly addiction? (Brody 2001) I ncreasingly, we are exposed to statistics, such as those in the epigraphs, that frame risky behavior or occurrence of a disease in terms of a temporal frame (e.g., every day, every year, every minute). The questions that arise then are the following: Do consumers draw different inferences from these statistics depending on the time frame in which they are presented? For instance, if the article said that 1,206 Americans succumb each day to the deadly effects of to- bacco smoke (vs. the numeric equivalent of 440,000 each year), would we draw different conclusions about the risks of smoking? In this article, we examine theoretical implications of the notion that risk perceptions are likely to be systematically affected by the temporal frame in which the risk communication is set.We examine the effects of framing a health hazard statistic using two different temporal frames-every day and every year-that objectively refer to same time period (i.e., the present). We investigate individuals' subjective perceptions of these reference periods through three studies by examining (a) risk perceptions, (b) attitudes about the health hazard, (c) behavioral intention, (d) emotions, and (e) effectiveness of risk communication. We study these issues across three domains: mononucleosis, cell phone radiation, and heart disease.Our theoretical framework is based on Construal Level Theory, which proposes that people use higher-level construals-characterized as abstract and decontextualized-to represent information about distant future events as compared to information about near future events (Trope and Liberman 2003). We contend that these effects of temporal distance translate to temporal framing such that, when a health hazard statistic is presented in a day frame, the risk is construed as more proximal and concrete than when presented in a year frame, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of a health message focused on negative consequences.We demonstrate that temporal framing reduces the gap between risk perceptions of self and other people (study 1) and that the nature of preventive behavior sp...
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