The Mental Representation of Brand Names: Are Brand Names a Class by Themselves?

What are brand names? This question has fascinated marketers and researchers for decades and has been addressed from various perspectives. There is the marketing view that brand names are part of the actual product and services (e.g., Javed, 1993); there is the branding view that brand names are linguistic symbols associated with a set of new meanings (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1998); there is the social psychological view that brand names can be emotion-laden identities (e.g., Mehrabian, 1992), and so on. This chapter investigates brand names from a new perspective. Attention is focused on brand names’ linguistic attributes, such as differences in name types (e.g., existing items vs. newly coined items), and their rich array of inherent perceptual features, such as case, color, size, fonts, and so forth. One unique aspect of our method resides in the use of the laterality framework as our experimental paradigm, which enables us to investigate the hemispheric processing and neuropsychological status of brand names by measuring participants’ accuracy and reaction times in lexical decision tasks, as well as participants’memory of the brand names. Interestingly, brand names as a class of words have been relatively unexplored by cognitive neuroscientists, which might be due to the implicit assumption that they are a subset of proper names. We suggest that brand names have a special neuropsychological status, but one that is different from proper names. This chapter is structured in the following way: First, it offers a brief background on the neuropsychological status of proper names and brand names. Next, it reports some research results. Finally, there is a discussion of the implications of the results for marketing and psycholinguistics.