The Effects of Brand Name Suggestiveness and Decision Goal on the Development of Brand Knowledge

Abstract

This research represents an initial step toward understanding how the brand name interacts with associated brand information in the development of brand knowledge. In particular, it draws on extant research on psycholinguistics, consumer memory, and decision making to demonstrate, in 2 experiments, that a brand name's semantic suggestiveness interacts with the type of decision task involved in the initial brand encounter to influence the brand information encoded and recalled during a subsequent encounter with a proposed brand extension. When information about an efficient set of new brands is learned through a choice task, brand names that suggest general superiority appear to benefit subsequent brand extensions more than names that are suggestive of category‐specific, attribute‐based superiority. After a judgment task, however, the latter names appear to benefit brand extensions more than the former ones. Moreover, this interactive effect of brand name suggestiveness and decision goal on brand extension evaluations is accompanied by systematic shifts in the extent to and the manner in which individuals process attribute information about the parent brands and recall and identify such information.

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