Do you see what I hear? An experimental study of linguistic influences on visual and auditory processing of novel brand names.
Item
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Title
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Do you see what I hear? An experimental study of linguistic influences on visual and auditory processing of novel brand names.
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Identifier
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AAI9986351
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identifier
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9986351
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Creator
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Lerman, Dawn Beth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Gould
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Business Administration, Marketing | Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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Brand names, like words, are made up of morphemes. Some brand names make use of morphemes that would be considered fairly familiar to consumers in the brand's target market while other brand names make use of morphemes that would be unfamiliar to such consumers. The morphemes in the names Vitabath and Hydrovive, for example, are familiar to English speaking consumers. However, the morphemes in the names Mont Blanc and Mike might not have been upon initial exposure. Consumer researchers have studied various types of brand names including foreign-sounding names and suggestive names without drawing on this notion of morphemic familiarity. As such, this dissertation makes a number of contributions including: (1) offering a theoretical framework for the study of brand names, (2) proposing a systematic approach to brand naming based on important naming criteria, (3) making explicit the tradeoffs involved in naming, and (4) uncovering different effects following visual versus auditory exposure, the two contexts in which brand name processing occurs.;An experimental study was used to test the effects of morphemic familiarity and exposure mode on brand name distinctiveness, ease of pronunciation, associations, attitudes, recall, and recognition. The interest in the results goes beyond the support, or lack thereof, of various hypotheses to what may be considered greater findings. The first greater finding concerns the rather stark differences between native and non-native speakers in perceptions of and attitudes toward morphemically familiar and morphemically unfamiliar names. For example, morphemically familiar names appear more distinctive and more likeable than morphemically unfamiliar names among natives whereas the reverse seems to be true among non-native speakers. The second greater finding concerns the role of phonological recoding in brand name processing. Linguists have long debated whether visually-presented verbal stimuli, such as brand names appearing in a print ad, access the lexicon directly, that is, visually, or whether they are phonologically recoded. The recall results seem to suggest that the visually-presented morphemically unfamiliar name, but not necessarily the visually-presented morphemically familiar name, was phonologically recoded by subjects. A variety of theoretical and managerial implications related to these findings are discussed.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
