Positioning products through names: effect of sound symbolism on perception of products with blended brand names

Purpose Managers prefer semantic imbeds in brand names, but extant literature has primarily studied fictitious names for their sound-symbolic perceptions. This paper aims to explore sound-symbolic perceptions of products with blended brand names (BBNs), formed with at least one semantic and one nonsemantic component. Unlike most extant literature, this study not only estimates the effect of vowels and consonants individually on product perceptions but also of their combinations. The boundary condition for this effect is examined by classifying products by their categorization and attributes by their abstractness. Design/methodology/approach Through a within-subject experiment, this paper tested perceptions of products with BBNs having high-/low-frequency sounds. A mixed-design experiment followed with sound frequency, product-level categorization and attributes’ abstractness as predictor variables. Findings For BBNs, vowel sounds convey brand meaning better than the combinations of vowel and consonant sounds – and these convey brand meaning better than consonant sounds. Differences in consumers’ perceptions of products with BBNs occur when the degree of attributes’ abstractness matches product-level categorization, such as when concrete attributes match subordinate-level categorization. Practical implications Brand managers/strategists can communicate product positioning (attribute-based) through BBNs created specifically for product categories and product types. Originality/value This research presents a comparative analysis across vowels, consonants and their combinations on consumers’ perceptions of products with BBNs. Manipulation of names’ length and position of the sound-symbolic imbed in the BBN proffered additional contributions. Another novelty is the interaction effect of product categorization levels and attributes’ abstractness on sound-symbolic perception.