Syllable Variation Impact on Brand Name Preference

Abstract

The current body of research in the language of advertising deals with the nature of segments, vowel quality, consonants, and vowel voicing, yet relatively little is understood about the impact of syllables on participants' behavior. This paper investigates syllable variation in brand names on customers' preferences in the language of advertising. A correlational-exploratory research design has been adopted. The instrument used to collect data was a questionnaire containing 40 fictitious brand names organized in two lists of 10 pairs. The first 10 pairs varied in terms of syllable type (open/ closed syllable), while the second 10 pairs varied in terms of syllable number (monosyllabic and disyllabic/ multisyllabic. The Participants were asked to choose from the first and second 10 pairs. Based on their responses, I calculated the Phi correlation coefficient (r_φ) to determine the correlation between variations at the syllabic level and brand name preference. The results revealed that there is a strong correlation between syllable variation in brand names and participants’ preference with (p < .05) and (r_φ=.436).In addition, participants preferred brand names containing open syllables. Moreover, Participants generally preferred disyllabic brand names. However, participants chose multisyllabic brand names over monosyllabic ones when choosing between the two. The obtained results have been very promising as they represent an initial step toward a framework that covers all variables in the language of advertising. Future work will concentrate on creating an exhaustive framework covering other stylistic and linguistic variables.