Brand logo and name association: its all in the name

Despite the expense of designing and the popularity of using logos to represent brands, there is a paucity of information on how such symbols are processed. This series of experiments used Repetition Blindness (RB) to measure implicit association of logos and names that varied in (1) the abstractness of the logo, and (2) the level of familiarity with the logo. RB is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when two items, presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), are encoded along repeated dimensions (e.g. visual, phonological, semantic) resulting in only one item being perceived (Bavelier, [1994] Buttle, Ball, Zhang, & Raymond, [2005] Kanwisher, [1987]). Phonological RB was revealed for both abstract and figurative logos and occurred regardless of familiarity. The results suggest that as long as a consumer has the opportunity to be exposed to the name of a logo then logo-name association learning is a rapid process. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]