关键词: 品牌名称, 形式表征, 字样, 语音, 消费者心理

Abstract:

As a special kind of vocabulary, the formal representation of brand name is divided into visual representation (the visual characteristics of printed letters) and auditory representation (the overall characteristics signature of a word), which can convey meaning to consumers independently of the meaning of the word. For brand names, the font style can provide visual representation through letter case (all uppercase, all lowercase and mixed case), font (structure, font, form and layout) and colour (hue, saturation and brightness); speech can provide auditory representation through phonemes (pronunciation and arrangement characteristics), syllables (spelling and number features), and accent/tone (positional/combinatorial characteristics). Brand name font style and speech appear frequently in various marketing materials, which have critical impacts on consumer psychology and behaviour, and both occur in the perceptual processing stage of vocabulary. Revealing the difference and connection between the two effects can not only provide a holistic research perspective for understanding brand name font style and speech but also provide inspiration for theoretical research and marketing practice.
The consequences and mechanisms of the audiovisual representation of brand names have dissimilarities and commonalities. Although they both affect consumers’ experiences, perceptions, attitudes and behavioural intentions, different dimensions of experience are influenced, with the former mainly involving aesthetic experience and legibility and the latter emotional experience and brand memory. Embodied cognitive theory and motoric fluency theory help explain this difference. The internal mechanism of brand name font style/speech affecting consumers has certain commonalities, such as perceptions of evaluation, potency and arousal (EPA) dimensions and perceptions of symbolic meaning and country-of-origin associations, but the specific types of neurobiological mechanism, processing fluency mechanism and metaphorical understanding mechanism differ. In addition, the brand name font style effect is moderated by individual characteristics, cultural values, external clues, and brand/product type, while the speech effect is moderated by personal experience, self-regulation, and brand/product type. There are also similarities and differences between the moderating factors of these two effects. In addition to vision and auditory effects, brand names also have interactive effects with other senses.
In addition, there is a cross-channel connection between the audiovisual effects of brand name. There is both consensus and controversy in academia over the cross-channel connection of the audiovisual effect of brand names: the consensus is that if font style and speech bring consistent perceptions of brand personality/product attributes, the two will have an additive effect, and the brand attractiveness, popularity, perception of quality and memory level will all increase. However, there is some disagreement about the relative weight of font style and speech in the integration effect: one point of view is that brand name font style and speech have an interactive effect on consumer response, but neither of them plays a dominant role. Another view is that brand name font style plays a more important role than speech when communicating brand meaning to consumers in emerging markets.
Future research should consider practical problems associated with the moderation of the psychological effect of brand name font style by other visual elements, the psychological speech effect of Chinese brand names, the weight distribution of brand name font style and speech in nonadditive effects, and the impact of brand name font style and speech variants on consumer psychology.

Key words: brand name, formal representation, font style, phonemes, consumers’ psychology