AMBITION | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
TAKING ACTION WITH OCCLUSIVE CONSONANTS
COUNTRY: FRANCE SCHOOL: GRENOBLE ECOLE DE MANAGEMENT A brand should start with the letter ‘B’, ‘D’, ‘P’ or ‘T ‘, rather than with an ‘F’, ‘L’, ‘S’ and ‘V’, according to Caroline Cuny, Marketing Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management. That’s because the pronunciation required for names beginning with occlusive consonants conjure feelings of action due to the movement of the mouth, as opposed to the passivity associated with names that begin with a constrictive consonant. In the context of service failure, this can help the younger generations of consumers to regain a perceived loss of control in their interactions with a brand. ‘When young adults are faced with a loss of control in terms of their interaction with a brand (and therefore a sense of being unsatisfied), they prefer brand names with occlusive consonants instead of constrictive ones because the brand generates a stronger feeling of action that can take back control of the situation and thus re-establish a feeling of personal control,’ Cuny said in explaining the results of three studies involving students and young adults conducted with Jamel Khenfer, a Professor at the College of Business at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. Brands would do well to use occlusive consonants independent of the meaning behind the words for their names, and to create phrases with the most occlusives in order to suggest stronger action when producing slogans, according to the research – published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services under the title, 'Brand Preference in the Face of Control Loss and Service Failure: The Role of the Sound of Brands'. The overall message here is that brands might be missing a trick when it comes to the use of sensory information: ‘How sound is interpreted can offer a wealth of information to help in the creation of brand names, in particular for brand names that have no 'meaning' in semantic terms. It would be a pity to not take advantage of sounds, in particular when services delivered by a brand might not always be perceived as perfect by customers and these sounds can help support the customer relationship,’ Cuny said. / TBD
PULLING THE PLUG ON R&D TOO LATE?
COUNTRY: CANADA SCHOOL: SCHULICH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
When an increase of spend is not mirrored in the return on the investment (ROI), this would ring alarm bells for organisations of any industry but could be a particular problem among biopharma firms. A new study has found that biopharma firms are investing too much in the R&D stage of drug production and failing to put a stop to it even when it looks unlikely the drug will succeed. The study analysed 1,300 early-stage drug discovery projects worldwide, and is co-authored by Moren Lévesque, Co-Director of Entrepreneurial Studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business. It all comes down to the amount of risk involved in developing a drug. If a drug has similar predecessors then it is relatively low risk, but these drugs can face more competition and ROI can be low. Drugs which are new and have no predecessors on which their development can be based have significantly more risk, even though they could potentially yield a high ROI. The recommendation from the research is that the biopharma firms should only continue investing in drugs which are in the middle of this risk continuum. The problem identified is that high-risk projects are likely to focus on drugs for rare diseases and the suggestion is that this is where governments and policymakers should be stepping in. They should be encouraging biopharma firms to continue with research into these rarer drugs, but also encouraging the sharing of data about these drugs to allow for joint effort to be made in their development. The development of the Covid-19 vaccines has now shown how competing firms and university researchers can work together effectively and, for Lévesque, show the way ahead: ‘Such programmes that combine expertise and efforts will undoubtedly remain needed in the new normal ahead of us.’ / EB
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Share your news and research updates by emailing AMBA & BGA’s Content Editor, Tim Banerjee Dhoul, at t.dhoul@associationofmbas.com
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