BRAND NAMES AND CONSUMER INFERENCE - THE EFFECT OF ADDING A NUMERIC COMPONENT TO A BRAND-NAME

Although approximately 10,000 of the 1.35 million Federally Registered trademarks are comprised in part or in whole of a number, the role of numbers in brand names is poorly understood. The different ways manufacturers use numbers in a brand name to communicate explicitly with consumers are discussed. However, in many instances the precise meaning of a number may be opaque to consumers. The effect of a non-explicit, numeric component on consumer inferences is explored with a survey which presented respondents with either a unknown brand with a numeric component or the same unknown brand without a numeric component and asked the respondent to associate a product with the name. The data suggest the addition of a numeric component to a brand name increases the number of technical product associations that consumers make with the name. It appears it may do so by increasing the number of associations made to a particular product (e.g., computers) rather than by significantly increasing the range of product that were evoked.