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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)

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