If you’re looking to devise or revise a slogan for your organization, you may need to choose between likableness and memorableness, according to the findings of a recent study. That’s not the best news, but the researchers do have advice for making slogans effective.
Investigators at the University of Missouri, University of Arizona and City University of London studied 820 brand slogans via a variety of experiments, with about 1,000 students and online workers telling them how much they liked or disliked a subset of actual slogans. Those same participants subsequently were given a surprise test to see which slogans they remembered seeing earlier.
The researchers used this information to identify five linguistic properties that had opposing effects on whether a slogan was liked and remembered: length, brand name, word frequency, perceptual distinctiveness and abstractness.
The authors found that people prefer slogans that are shorter, omit the brand name and involve words that are frequently used and abstract. On the other hand, they found that slogans are less liked, but better remembered, if they are long, include the brand name and feature unusual and concrete words (for instance, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”). Put another way, the attributes that make a slogan easier to process lead to it being more likable but less memorable, and vice versa.
What’s a company to do? It comes down to your organization’s strategic goals, according to the researchers.
Brands that need to gain recognition might consider using rare and concrete words, whereas established brands might want to use words that are common and abstract.
“To be memorable, slogans should be relatively long, include the brand name and use rare and concrete words. For instance, BMW could make its slogan easier to remember by changing it from ‘The ultimate driving machine’ to ‘BMW is the peak driving machine,’ ” said Zachary Estes, PhD, a professor of marketing at the Bayes Business School at City University of London and one of the study’s authors. “But that would also make it harder to like.”
You can read more in the study, titled “Intel Inside: The Linguistic Properties of Effective Slogans,” which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research, at the link.
Lois A. Bowers is the editor of McKnight’s Senior Living. Read her other columns here.
