Attractiveness in the Sounds of Brand Names: A Perceptual Study on Cantonese Listeners

A basic notion in linguistics is the arbitrary relation between meaning and speech sounds. With this general pattern being true, a few case studies have shown certain degree of correlation between specific speech sounds and their perceived meaning. For example, experimental studies (Kohler 1947, Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001, among others) showed that nonce words like takete/kiki tend to be perceived as being related to jagged shape while those like maluma/bouba to rounded shape. Along with such observation, studies have also indicated that, when used in brand names, some speech sounds are more likely to be related to more attractiveness than others. For example, a corpus study by Pogacar et al. (2015) showed that plosives are more commonly used than fricatives in top brand names; an experiment on written forms by Klink (2000) suggested that high-frequency consonants like fricatives are likely to be related to qualities that are prettier, friendlier, and more pleasant. While these claims were all supported by empirical evidence, there have been relatively few known studies directly testing the auditory perception of the attractiveness of speech sounds in brand names.

Based on the previous studies, two research questions are raised in this study: (i) is there any relation between certain speech sounds and the perceived attractiveness of a brand name? (ii) if yes, which is perceived as being more attractive, fricative or plosive? To answer these questions, a two-alternative forced-choice experiment was conducted in which listeners chose between two auditory names for a brand that they perceived as being more attractive. The presented products include four types: Fragrance, Camera, Clothing, and Milk, to cover a variety of product types. The auditory stimuli (i.e., the brand names) were nonce words produced by two native English speakers, a male and a female, both trained phoneticians. Within each stimulus pair, e.g.,fesk-pesk, the two auditory names minimally contrast by their onsets, e.g., a fricative ([f, v, s, J]) vs. a stop ([p, b, t, k]). The participants were 24 native Cantonese listeners, 12 male and 12 female, all undergraduate students.

The experiment results turned out to show diverse patterns of perceived attractiveness across different types of products: (a) for Fragrance and Camera, fricatives tend to be perceived as more attractive than stops; (b) for Clothing, the reverse pattern is observed, where stops are generally judged as more attractive than fricatives; (c) for Milk, however, there is no indication of difference between fricatives and stops. In addition, the same patterns are observed for stimuli in the male voice and the female voice. In general, this study shows that (i) for brand names, there seems to be an indication of the correlation between speech sounds and perceived attractiveness of a product and that (ii) for fricatives vs. stops, different patterns exist across different product types.