The role of sound symbolism and of the logographic script in brand perception in the Chinese context: an experimental study

The role of sound symbolism in creating successful brand and product names has attracted considerable attention from researchers in marketing (Klink 2000; see e.g. Spence 2012 for an overview). In the research on phonosymbolic associations in branding, it has been pointed out that what works for Western cultures, the focus of much research, may not always hold for other contexts (Motoki & Pathak 2022). In this talk, we present the results of three experimental studies on how different sound attributes of hypothetical names for vegetarian restaurants, as well as graphic attributes of Chinese characters, are perceived by native (Mainland) speakers of Chinese. Participants (sample size 160-170 in each study) were presented made-up names for vegetarian restaurants, and we asked to rate them on a 1-7 Likert scale for 19 attributes related to vegetarian food (besides 28 other screening and atittudinal questions): the first two experiments used Pinyin, whereas the last one used made-up Chinese characters. Our results show that: 1. a name in the first tone is considered as more ‘healthy’ and ‘harmonious’ than one in the third or fourth tone; 2. a name with a fricative consonant (e.g. fīfī) is considered as more ‘harmonious’ than one with a stop consonant (e.g. gīgī); 3. A name using characters with less strokes and a symmetric structure is considered to be more ‘healthy’ and ‘harmonious’ than one using characters with more strokes (and all asymmetric characters). Moreover, these attributes correlate positively with the perception of a name as suitable for vegetarian restaurants.