Brand name confusion: Subjective and objective measures of orthographic similarity.

Abstract

Determining brandname similarity is vital in areas of trademark registration and brand confusion. Students rated the orthographic (spelling) similarity of word pairs (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and brandname pairs (Experiment 5). Similarity ratings were consistently higher when words shared beginnings rather than endings, whereas shared pronunciation of the stressed vowel had small and less consistent effects on ratings. In Experiment 3 a behavioral task confirmed the similarity of shared beginnings in lexical processing. Specifically, in a task requiring participants to decide whether two words presented in the clear (a probe and a later target) were the same or different, a masked prime word preceding the target shortened response latencies if it shared its initial three letters with the target. The ratings of students for word and brandname pairs were strongly predicted by metrics of orthographic similarity from the visual word identification literature based on the number of shared letters and their relative positions. The results indicate a potential use for orthographic metrics in brandname registration and trademark law.

Intel Inside: The Linguistic Properties of Effective Slogans

“…The latter research suggests that distinguishing a perceptually similar word from its close orthographic neighbors requires attention, effort, and care. For example, in one study participants were more likely to confuse perceptually similar, compared to distinct, brand names (Burt et al 2017). Thus, after accounting for word frequency, consumers should process slogans with distinctive words more fluently than slogans with perceptually similar words (cf.…”

How important is the name in predicting false recognition for lookalike brands?

“…Courts may also take into account the fame of the first user’s mark, the sophistication of the likely consumers, how common elements of the mark are in the particular product category (i.e., whether the words, packaging, colors, or images are widely used in relation to the goods or services in question), whether or not the defendant deliberately set out to confuse consumers, and any evidence that real world consumers have been confused. In addition, courts make assumptions about what sorts of similarity are most likely to be confusing: for example, assumptions about the relative importance of the beginnings, endings, or vowel sounds of words (Burt et al, in press); the relative importance of brand names versus other aspects of packaging; or elements of a product’s get up that consumers will remember.…”

“…Specifically, we can use experimental and survey methods to test the assumptions trademark law makes about how consumers process information. For example, we have used subjective responses (a survey method) to test the judicial assumption that the beginning of a word is more important than the ending in determining similarity (Burt, McFarlane, Kelly, Humphreys, Weatherall, & Burrell, in press). The important point here is that we can use the results of a survey that does not attempt to obtain a broadly representative sample or an experiment that does not use a high fidelity simulation of a shopping scenario to test whether an assumption generally holds without purporting to answer whether consumers would or would not be likely to be confused in any given case.…”