World-as-brand name

[Doug Millison]

http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992662

Brand names bring special brain buzz 

 
10:00 13 August 02
Hazel Muir

 
It is what every advertiser would have dreamed of -
brand names have a unique impact on our brains.

Brand names engage the "emotional", right-hand side of
the brain more than other words, new experiments
suggest. And they are more easily recognised when they
are in capital letters.

"It is surprising," says Eran Zaidel, head of the
University of California in Los Angeles laboratory
where the research was conducted. "The rules that
apply to word recognition in general do not
necessarily apply here."

Robert Jones, head of consulting at the brand
strategists Wolff Olins in London, told New Scientist:
"This is very intriguing indeed. It supports our
instinctive belief that brands are a special class of
word - they are like a poem all in one word in their
ability to evoke and express ideas."


Unique fonts 


Our brains do not process all types of words in the
same way. For example, some patients with head
injuries can quickly match a personal proper name like
Bill Clinton to a photo - but common nouns like
"house" or "paper" mean nothing to them.

Possidonia Gontijo of the University of California in
Los Angeles wondered if our brains lump brand names
into their own special category. They are unlike any
other class of word because they are consistently
represented in the same way, with unique fonts, cases
and colours.

And unlike proper names, they usually apply to a group
of objects. Most people know of only one "Taj Mahal",
for instance, but "Sony" conjures up everything from
TVs to computers and cameras.

To find out more, Gontijo and her colleagues tested
how quickly and accurately 48 students recognised
hundreds of words as real or not. The real words were
brand names like "Compaq" and common nouns like
"river". "Nonwords" were 108 meaningless letter
strings like "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.


Brand power 


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.

That makes sense, claims Jones, because the right side
of the brain deals with emotions: "A brand's power is
that it conjures up a whole range of associations and
ideas, which are primarily emotional."

Additional work by Gontijo suggests that people
recognise personal proper names more quickly and
accurately than brand names, leaving brand names in a
class all of their own. 

But how could our brains have evolved processing
circuits for brands, which are such a recent
invention? Zaidel says they did not; the fact that we
can read at all suggests new language features simply
recruit existing brain machinery. "While brands are a
recent linguistic development, so is reading from an
evolutionary perspective," he says.

Journal reference: Brain and Language (vol 82, p 327) 

 
10:00 13 August 02

=====
<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com