ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the benefits of different kinds of brand names, including words and nonwords. It discusses the role of phonemes, morphemes, and semantics in imbuing brand names with meaning. The chapter helps marketers to identify the criteria for selecting brand names in local markets and possibly adapting them for use abroad. It explains how promotion and merchandising of a brand can affect memory for brand names. Cross-cultural research indicates that phonetic-symbolism effects for brand names generalize across languages, thus enabling marketers to embed universal meaning into brand names. When consumers encounter a new brand name, they rely on the lexicon, which includes knowledge of the morphemic structure of a learned language. The globalization of markets, and the linguistic diversity that exists even within individual geographic markets, requires that global brand names be easily pronounceable in multiple languages. Depending on how they are presented, brand names contain a wide variety of features.
