Memorable or liked? MU professor's research on business slogans could have broader impacts

"Think," "Think Small," and "Think Different," all are slogans for major businesses, both U.S. based and international. Seeing them on their own without a reference to the company, would you know which brand they are representing?

Possibly not. To answer the question: IBM, Volkswagen and Apple.

A University of Missouri professor, who started researching the intersectionality of likable and memorable business slogans eight years ago and why linguistic choices can have significant impacts on both, saw results of his and his colleagues' study published in May in the Journal of Consumer research, titled "Intel Inside: The Linguistic Properties of Effective Slogans."

"My research lies at the intersection of language and marketing, or cognitive psychology and marketing, and how consumers are processing the language that is used in marketing communications. It all stems from my love for language and how people process the constituents (parts) of language," said Brady Hodges, assistant professor at the Robert J. Trulaske Sr. College of Business, Trulaske Dean’s Advisory Board faculty scholar and founding director of the Trulaske Biometric and Behavioral Research Lab.

While the research explored business slogans, it could have impacts on other forms of public messaging, he said.

"Historically, cultivating an effective slogan has been more art than science. Our research attempts to give science a larger role by offering marketers, advertisers, and creatives objective guidance on how to pick the words in a slogan," Hodges and his colleagues Zachary Estes at the Bayes Business School of City University of London in England and Caleb Warren, of the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, wrote in the study's conclusion.

Hodges first undertook his study while in his doctorate program at Texas A&M University, conducting most of the survey-based studies there. There were other consumer studies, such as through Facebook advertising to get click-through rates on different advertisements. All the studies looked at the impacts of word choice in slogans. Following replication surveys at MU, among other process reviews, his work was published.

Hodges explains how results of the study could apply to other messaging or even by small businesses aiming to grow their brand. This will take more study, he said.

"I think we are always seeking to discover more truth. You can expand this to emergency messages where we get notifications from police and how they word those could enact action or help things to be memorable. There are positive ways to influence societies with language in addition to businesses increasing their revenues," Hodges said.

"This study of language can be used across the board, whether that is in political campaigns, emergency messages or promoting social wellbeing."

When it comes to small businesses it is common advice to start with with a more memorable slogan, even it is not very well liked due to it being wordier and using more uncommonly used words. As brand or business recognition grows, the slogan can scale back to more common word choices to craft a more likable, but not as memorable slogan, Hodges said.

"It should be more concrete in the words that it uses and it should include the brand name," he said about more memorable slogans. "Previous research finds it is more important early on to increase brand awareness. As new brands progress through their company life cycle, they will eventually want to focus more on crafting likeable slogans that can help them increase brand attitude.

"Our research can help brands in both phases know how to do this."

While application of slogans has this common theory, Hodges research, again, was more on what slogan properties are needed to create a memorable versus a likable slogan. Long slogans are less likable, but more memorable. Those with words that are more commonly used will be liked, but not necessarily remembered. Slogans with more concrete word choices than abstract ideas are more memorable. Slogans with a company name as part of it also are more memorable, but not as well liked, such as "Every kiss begins with Kay."

Changing one or two words in a slogan to their synonyms can have impact in either direction, memorable or likable, the study found, and it gives marketers and others the tools to craft messages that could be either. It gives the answer to the "why" question of which slogan is effective, Hodges said.

Charles Dunlap covers local government, community stories and other general subjects for the Tribune. You can reach him at cdunlap@columbiatribune.com or @CD_CDT on Twitter. Subscribe to support vital local journalism.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: MU professor's study of business slogans could have broader impacts