Marketing often treats language as a vehicle for messages: a slogan, a name, a translated questionnaire. Carnevale, Luna and Lerman (2017) propose treating it as an object of study in its own right. They define brand linguistics as “the study of language effects on consumers in brand-related settings”, a subdiscipline of consumer behaviour that takes the consumer as its unit of analysis.
Their framework integrates three lenses. Psycholinguistics examines language inside the mind: how it is acquired, stored, comprehended and produced, mostly through laboratory experiments with memory and processing measures. Sociolinguistics examines language “outside” the mind, in communication: social structure, variation and attitudes towards languages, studied through ethnography, semi-structured interviews and experiments. Semiotics asks how signs create meaning, drawing on Peirce’s sign–object–interpretant model and its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions. The whole is built on Schmitt’s (2012) Consumer Psychology of Brands model and its five processes: identifying, experiencing, integrating, signifying and connecting.
Why is one lens not enough? The authors’ example is choosing a language to address Moroccan immigrants in Tarragona. The decision depends on their proficiency in Spanish and Catalan (psycholinguistics), on their attitudes towards each culture and language (sociolinguistics), and on the meanings each choice conveys (semiotics). For this reason they argue that the field must be interdisciplinary, with the lenses integrated, rather than merely multidisciplinary, with the lenses placed side by side.
For market research practice, the framework helps locate a language question before a study is designed:
- Is the issue how consumers process and remember a word, name or message?
- Is it what a language or variety signals to a particular segment?
- Is it what a sign means to those who interpret it?
- Which combination of these does a multilingual market require?
Which language decisions in your own projects would you place under each lens?
References
Carnevale, M., Luna, D., & Lerman, D. (2017). Brand linguistics: A theory-driven framework for the study of language in branding. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(2), 572–591.
Schmitt, B. (2012). The consumer psychology of brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(1), 7–17.