Branding and Linguistic Anthropology: Brand Names, Indexical Fields, and Sound Symbolism
While the last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in the value of sociocultural anthropology to marketing and advertising (e.g., Sherry 1995; Sunderland and Denny 2007), linguistic anthropology has received significantly less attention from marketing theorists and practitioners. One notable exception is linguistic and linguistic-anthropological research on sound symbolism (e.g., Nuckolls 1999). Sound symbolism is the idea that speech sounds (i.e., vowels and consonants) by themselves convey meanings. For instance, the high front vowel [i] has been found to suggest small size to speakers of different languages around the world. Marketers have taken notice of ideas like this and used them to develop brand names that highlight brand- and product-related information.