COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF BRAND NAMES

The brand name selected for a new product can have a critical bearing on the consumer's perception of that product. In addition, a brand name which is inherently easy to remember can result in the achievement of desired levels of brand awareness more efficiently.; This research draws upon theoretical frameworks within the disciplines of cognitive psychology and linguistics and develops a theory of the cognitive processing of brand names. Desirable characteristics of brand names are derived from the developed theory and experimentally tested for their ability to identify brand names which will be more easily recalled and more capable of eliciting desired brand images.; Theoretically derived variables affecting a brand name's memorability are: (1) the degree of similarity between the total cognitive activation pattern associated with a brand name and the total cognitive activation pattern associated with retrieval of that brand name; (2) the size of the total cognitive activation pattern associated with a brand name. Size has as its components: (a) the attention attraction power of the brand name; (b) the number and types of cognitive representational system codes) visual analogue, emotional, semantic) activated by a brand name, and; (c) the degree of spreading cognitive activation within representational system codes.; The theoretically derived variable related to the degree of brand name-desired image fit is: the degree of similarity between the total cognitive activation pattern associated with a brand name and the total cognitive activation pattern associated with the desired image.; Experimental results indicate that brand name recall amongst subjects classified as having low (list) learning ability was significantly related to the joint, multivariate distribution of the two major theoretically defined variables. Subjects classified as having high (list) learning ability demonstrated little relationship between recall ability and theoretically derived brand name characteristics.; The degree of brand name-desired image fit was found not to be related to the degree of similarity of cognitive activation patterns theoretically defined.