http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992662
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)
http://IanGoddard.net
Out-of-Body Explanation: http://iangoddard.net/paranorm.htm
