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Brand Names and Brand Building: Researchers at UCLA study how brand names engage the emotions and find that brand names have a power that other
words don't.

LOS ANGELES, Dec.17, 2002. In a stunning pseudoscientific breakthrough, researchers at UCLA have shown that brand names engage the emotions more than other words, at least in the minds of 48 undergraduate test subjects.

The students were tested with hundreds of words in three categories: common nouns like "river" or "tree;" brand names like "Sony" or "Compaq;" and "non-words" such as "beash" and "noerds."

The students saw the words either all in capitals, or all in lower case, flashed to the left or the right side of a computer screen.

The students recognised the common nouns most quickly and accurately, followed by the brand names, then nonwords. Whether common nouns were in capitals or lower case made no difference. But the students recognised brand names more accurately when they were in capital letters, something that advertisers will be keen to know.

Also, common names were most easily recognised in the right visual field - which connects most strongly to the left side of the brain. But this effect was less strong for the brand names, suggesting the right side of the brain plays a bigger role in identifying brand names.

The most interesting implication here is not so much the typographic trend that ad agencies and design houses will be following next year, but rather that names which tell stories trigger emotions.

Unfortunately, the test is slanted in that the common nouns used are precisely that -- common, generic, interchangeable -- while brand names are specific, more apt to resonate on a personal level than impersonal common nouns.

Had the test included words from each subject's personal history, perhaps the name of a specific river they had recently visited instead of just "river," there would probably be more of an emotional connection with those names than with "Compaq." This is one way that marketeers use focus groups to generate focus pocus: bogus "research" meant to prop-up a preconception.

That "beash" and "noerds" failed to spark an emotional connection shouldn't surprise anybody. Just take a look at some of the "noerds" in our Morpheme Addiction category and see how warm and fuzzy your brain's emotional center gets.