Brand Naming and Sound Symbolism — Amati and Associates

Developing a brand name is a mix of creative and analytical efforts: the brand name needs to deliver on three critical components (i.e., promise, personality, and performance).

The three most common archetypes on which creative agencies develop brand names are , , and sound symbolism .

However, all influential brand names combine all three, with sound symbolism the most challenging among these tools.

What is sound symbolism?

Sound symbolism refers to the non-arbitrary mappings between phonetic properties of speech sounds and their meaning, even though the acoustic features and psychological mechanisms that give rise to sound symbolism are not, as yet, altogether clear.

To understand the symbolism, we need to introduce sound first!

In the study of the human voice, consonants belong to either one of two groups: and . Voiced consonants require vocal cords to produce the respective sounds, whereas voiceless ones do not. On the other end, both vowels and diphthongs are always voiced, but vowels are clustered as front/bright or back/dark, depending on whether the highest point of the tongue is placed in the front or the back of the tongue.