The role of mitigation and strengthening cognitive operations in brand names design: a case study of Spanish and American wine brands

ABSTRACT

Despite the relevance of powerful brands in the present-day market, research on the process of brand name design from a cognitive perspective focuses almost exclusively on the effects of the use of conceptual metaphor, and to a lesser extent, metonymy, overlooking the role played by other cognitive strategies. This paper analyzes the potentiality of mitigation and strengthening cognitive operations as tools for the systematic, risk-free design of new brand names with highly predictable and felicitous connotations. In particular, it focuses on their role in the systematic generation of axiologically positive brands in both Spanish and American wine labels, thus largely reducing the need for the costly and time-consuming cultural checks that branding companies need to run on new brand names before their commercial launching. In so doing, the interaction of the two aforementioned cognitive operations with a number of pragmatic principles and cultural models of social interaction, and their subservience to other cognitive operations, like those of comparison, correlation, and domain expansion and reduction, are also considered. The results of the study offer new insights on the semantics of commercial brand names which should prove useful for branding professionals, as well as data of interest to linguists dealing with inter-linguistic issues and cognitive modeling alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Branding
• pragmatics
• inter-cultural studies
• wine brands
• cultural models

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number FFI2013-43593-P].

Notes on contributor

Lorena Pérez Hernández, Ph.D., works as a permanent lecturer at the University of La Rioja (Spain) since 2001. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Review of Cognitive Linguistics (RCL), the Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy (John Benjamins), the Journal of English Studies (JES), and American Journal of Linguistics (AJL).

Her present research interests include aspects of cognitive and functional semantics. She has looked into issues of grammatical metaphor and metonymy from a cross-linguistic perspective, as well as into cognitive and constructional aspects of speech acts. Simultaneously, she has also investigated the metaphorical grounding of modals in Spanish, French, English, and Italian. She has published over 30 papers in high-impact international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Cognitive Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics. At present she collaborates with Lexicon Branding, Co. (Sausalito, USA) as a linguist consultant in the assessment of new commercial brands.

Notes

1. Since diminutives involve a downscaling of the attributes of an entity, the brands based on this linguistic realization procedure exploit the Modesty Maxim by presenting themselves as “small” and “unimportant” (and thus, maximizing dispraise of themselves). However, diminutives, as shall be shown in Sections 5.1 and 6.1., simultaneously exploit the ICM of Size, according to which “small” and “unimportant” things are often seen as harmless, desirable, and/or appealing (see Section 4.3).

2. The ubiquity of the Idealized Cognitive Model of Size is a theoretical construct that has not yet been ascertained or refuted through empirical analysis. Its formulation has been made in relation to Western cultures (Europe, North-America) and it is, therefore, useful for the analysis of the Spanish and American brands under consideration, but its full cultural scope is yet to be determined.

3. This being one of the fundamental tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory within Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff and Turner 1989, and references therein).

4. Comparison and correlation operations are two subtypes of the traditional umbrella term cognitive metaphor (Lakoff 1987). Domain expansion and reduction operations correspond to part-for-whole and whole-for-part cognitive metonymies (see Pérez-Hernández 2013a for an exhaustive description of these four types of cognitive operations and their role in wine branding).

5. Although the use of French, Italian, and Spanish diminutives is likely to have some meaning effects on the overall interpretation of the brand, as we have theoretically speculated in the text above, the nature and scope of the specific associations and connotations that may derive from them should be the object of more fine-grained empirical work based on the statistical treatment of consumers’ answers to specifically-targeted queries and questionnaires.

6. An additional reason for using French, Italian, and Spanish diminutive suffixes may well be that brands with overtones from these languages may benefit from the connotations of exclusivity and top quality that the wines from the corresponding countries have already earned.