BRAND POWER
By Adapted by D. Jimenez

Unknowingly, brand names affect the way we eat, clean our house and socialize. It affects the way we think, how we plan and practically our entire life. A brand name engages the emotional right-hand side of our brain more than other ordinary words we use, as new experiments suggest.

Brands are even more easily recognized when it’s in capital letters, according to a UK science journal – “The New Scientist this Week. “Its surprising said Eran Zaidel, head of the University of California in Los Angeles laboratory where the research was conducted. "The rules that apply to word recognition in general do not necessarily apply here." Research shows our brains process types of words differently. For example, some patients with head injuries can quickly match a personal proper name like Imelda Marcos to a photo - but common nouns such as "car" or "pencil" don’t mean anything to them.

Brands are presented with usually unique typeface and colors. Unlike proper names, they usually apply to groups of objects. Filipinos only knows one Mayon Volcano or Malacañang Palace but brands like “Samsung” call up many things from washing machine, television and cell phone gadget. 48 students were tested to recognize hundreds of words as “real” or “not real”. The real words categories were brands like Compaq and common nouns like “river”. Non-words were meaningless letter-strings like “beash” and “noerds”.

The respondents saw the words in all caps or lowercase.The result showed they recognized common nouns most quickly and accurately (river, sand), followed by brand names and lastly non-words. Whether common nouns were in all caps or lowercase made no difference. However, the respondents recognized brand names more accurately when they were in CAPITAL LETTERS. Common names were easily recognized in the right visual field - which connects strongly to the left side of the brain.

But this effect was less strong for the brand names, suggesting that the right side of our brain plays a bigger role in identifying brand names. Not surprising of course since our brain’s right side deals with emotions, whereas a brand's power is that it calls up a whole range of associations and ideas (sub-products or sub-brands), are primarily emotional." Interestingly however, research showed that people recognize personal proper names (such as Belo, Giorgio Armani or Razon’s ) more quickly and accurately than brand names (such as Compaq or Panasonic).