Script and Brand Name Recall
Script and brand name recall is the proposal that the way a language is written shapes how brand names are remembered. A 1994 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research by Bernd Schmitt, Yigang Pan and Nader Tavassoli compared Chinese and English and found partial support for differences in unaided recall of names that were heard or read.
What it is
Chinese is written with ideographic characters and English with an alphabet. The authors argued that these structural differences shape mental representations, and so affect how consumers remember verbal information. They predicted that unaided recall of a brand name would differ depending on whether the name was heard or read in each language.
In effect
Their experiment was cross-cultural, run in China and the United States. It partially supported the predictions for unaided recall. The practical reading is ours: a name has a sound and a script as well as a meaning, and each can be tested with local listeners and readers before launch.
What it does not say
The concept concerns memory, not liking, and it covers one language pair. It does not say that one language is easier or better for brand names. The support was partial.
Sources
- Schmitt, B. H., Pan, Y., & Tavassoli, N. T. (1994). Language and Consumer Memory: The Impact of Linguistic Differences between Chinese and English. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(3), 419. https://doi.org/10.1086/209408