Going to great lengths in the pursuit of luxury: How longer brand names can enhance the luxury perception of a brand

Abhishek Pathak,Gemma Anne Calvert,Olivia Petit,Carlos Velasco

doi:10.1002/mar.21247

Abstract

AbstractBrand names are a crucial part of the brand equity and marketing strategy of any company. Research suggests that companies spend considerable time and money to create suitable names for their brands and products. This paper uses the Zipf's law (or Principle of Least Effort) to analyze the perceived luxuriousness of brand names. One of the most robust laws in linguistics, Zipf's law describes the inverse relationship between a word's length and its frequency i.e., the more frequently a word is used in language, the shorter it tends to be. Zipf's law has been applied to many fields of science and in this paper, we provide evidence for the idea that because polysyllabic words (and brand names) are rare in everyday conversation, they are considered as more complex, distant, and abstract and that the use of longer brand names can enhance the perception of how luxurious a brand is (compared with shorter brand names, which are considered to be close, frequent, and concrete to consumers). Our results suggest that shorter names (mono‐syllabic) are better suited to basic brands whereas longer names (tri‐syllabic or more) are more appropriate for luxury brands.

Highlights

A brand’s name is often the first touchpoint between a consumer and a brand
In Study 3, we explored the optimum brand name length and show that the incremental increase in the luxury perception, beyond a trisyllabic name length is minimal, and in Study 4 we extend these result across product categories, from basic brands to three levels of luxury brands i.e., accessible, intermediate and inaccessible luxury brands (Alleres, 1990)
Participants listened to 84 HBNs (i.e., 28 HBN groups chosen from Table 2 at random) and rated whether the HBN was appropriate for a basic brand or a luxury brand

Summary

Introduction

A brand’s name is often the first touchpoint between a consumer and a brand. It is commonly believed that brand naming is one of the most important decisions undertaken by brand consultants and marketers (Klink & Wu, 2014). As compared to basic brands, tend to be considered costly, rare, and unique (Ko, Costello, & Taylor, 2017; Velasco & Spence, in press) and in that sense, a luxury brand may signify something that is infrequent or uncommon Building on this idea, in the present research we inquire (based on the research on Zipf’s law), whether people would associate shorter and longer brand names differently with the concept of luxury. This paper is the first to show that brand name length can imbue (or enhance) the luxury perception of brand (see Table 1, for an overview of the research in this field, and our incremental contribution).

Participants

Results and discussion

Methodology