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

Abstract

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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“…First, the present study adds to the growing body of research on sound symbolism in marketing and consumer psychology. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the study of sound symbolism has been limited to phonetic symbolism in the marketing literature (Argo, et al, 2010;Coulter & Coulter, 2010;Doyle & Bottomley, 2011;Klink, 2000;Klink & Athaide, 2012;Kuehnl & Mantau, 2013;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007;Shrum, et al, 2012;Yorkston & Menon, 2004). The current study extends this narrow focus to musical stimuli, suggesting that sound symbolism can affect a much wider range of contexts and applications than previously assumed.…”

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