Abstract:

There is Increasingly less questioning of the importance which the name of a product (or a service, a company, etc...) represents in relation to the favourable or unfavourable image given by the latter: the name conveys Information - justified or otherwise - concerning the characteristics of the product, the functions which It fulfils, the needs which it satisfies, and so on; it can arouse emotional reactions of greater or lesser intensity ; in short. It contributes to forming a definite aura surrounding the product. The discovery of a name which is attractive and sales-promotional has been found in practice to be a more difficult matter them appears at first sight, mainly because the problem of motivation is further complicated by linguistic considerations (phonetic symbolism, semantic overtones, etc...), which are particularly thorny when the name will have to be pronounceable in several languages, and by legal problems whose solution is difficult when the name has to be Inserted in a very dense population of products (such as pharmaceuticals) or in a very wide range of product categories. The purpose of the paper is to describe the main lines of the name research procedure which has been designed and is applied by the Marketing and Forecasting Division of SEMA.