The Development between Brand Name Linguistic Characteristics and Brand Preference

Existing research on brand names and consumer preference has shown that the sound of a name has a significant influence on consumers willingness to buy a product. Moreover, it has previously been shown that the sound of food names have an effect on consumers food preference. This study aims to determine the effect of certain factors on consumers impression of different foods. These factors include taste factorssuch as physiological needs, food culture, prior information, and addictive tasteas well as linguistic factors, such as semantic appositeness, paronomasia, and initial plosives. We also accounted for the influence of specific Japanese language linguistic sounds. We used two dishes with two menus per dish to determine participants preferences based on the taste factors and linguistic factors. The results showed that prior information about food and semantic appositeness (sounds that match the image of the dish) have the most pronounced effect on participants preference. Furthermore, our results show that onomatopoeic sounds that are common to the Japanese language (such as fuwa-fuwa and moti-moti) also have an effect, depending on the soft or hard, light or heavy, or bright or dark characteristics of the sound. This research will contribute naming ready-made dishes and Bentos to companies as Japanese consumers cannot help choosing.