User Survey: Sounds in Brand Names
This user survey project represents by Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics thesis project completed in 2019 to fulfill the requirements of my undergraduate degree at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. It was working on this project that gave me the realization that I want to work in user research for my career.
The poster documenting my research is available for download here.
Purpose:
Based on previous research into phonaesthemes (sound combinations that exhibit sound symbolism), I tested how changes in the phonemes in fake brand names affected people’s perceptions of those brand names.
Process:
This Qualtrics survey was created with the help of Dr. Franny Brogan, a professor of linguistics specializing in sounds, and Dr. Robin Melnick, a professor of linguistics specializing in computational linguistics. The survey was distributed to users through the crowdsourcing platform Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Outcomes:
Many of people’s perceptions of my fake brand names aligned with my hypothesis that certain sound combinations elicit certain connotations. For instance, respondents noted that my food brands staring with “m-” feel comforting, and show brand ending in “- ip” sounded faster.
Lessons Learned:
Above all else, this project sparked in me a drive to apply my linguistics degree in a way that tests how users’ linguistic backgrounds affect their interpretations of systems or products. I found crowdsourcing to be a useful method for gathering large amounts of data about a few number of variables, and a mixed methods approach helped to balance the data available to support my hypothesis.