High-priced branding consultants who huddle together for months to concoct a new company name would like the public to think that effective naming involves secrets revealed only to those who earned a Ph.D. in linguistics, speak 17 languages or learned advertising through working their way up the ranks at a famous-brand agency.
If you turn away from the idea of naming as a black art, however, you can find some secrets of branding in scientific studies that have been published after having been reviewed by academic authorities as reliable. Here are four points on which researchers have given all of us insights that help guide the creation of effective business names.
1. Pronounceability matters. A 2009 study by University of Michigan researchers revealed that if we have difficulty pronouncing a product name, we consider it risky. This builds on a 2006 study from Princeton University psychologists who discovered that people shied away from buying newly offered stocks from companies with hard-to-pronounce names and hard-to-say stock ticker symbols, compared to companies with easier-to-pronounce company names and symbols.
Lesson: Before settling on your final choice of a company name, score the candidates according to how easy they are to pronounce. This doesn’t mean simply whether or not there are combinations of sounds that may be unfamiliar to many people, as in the proposed restaurant name, Hsizienchi, but also whether there are likely to be uncertainties about how to pronounce something, as with Caf
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