Why consumers would rather go to IKEA than ikea

The way that brand names use capital and lower case letters is vital to their quick recognition. That is the conclusion of research published in the Society's British Journal of Psychology by a team of researchers led by Dr Manuel Perea from the University of Valencia.

The researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 20 volunteers were shown a series of familiar brand names – 52 of the names are always printed in upper case letters and 52 that are always printed in lower case letters – and asked to say, under a strict time limit, which were brand names and which were not.

Some of the brand names were shown as usually printed, for example adidas and IKEA, and some were shown in a different form, for example ADIDAS and ikea.

The researchers found that the volunteers were quicker at identifying as brand names those that were presented in their usual form.
In a second experiment the volunteers were presented with the same brand name twice. The second word was always in the correct case, but the first word, which was presented subliminally, was sometimes right and sometimes wrong – so the volunteers might be given the pair adidas-adidas or ADIDAS-adidas. In each case the volunteers were asked to say whether or not the second, visible word was a brand name.
The researchers found that the volunteers were faster and more accurate at identifying the brand name when the first version had been in the correct case (adidas-adidas) than when it was in the wrong case (ADIDAS-adidas).

However, they did not find the same effect when the brand name was usually printed in upper case letters – the volunteers scored just as highly with ikea-IKEA as they did with IKEA-IKEA.

Dr Manuel Perea says:

“Our findings are interesting because current psychological theory suggests that people recognise words exclusively on the basis of their abstract letter identities, with the case of those letters playing no part. It seems we have posed some problems for that theory.

"The visual elements of a brand name – colour, format – are important to the recognition of brand names. In our experiments, the brand names were presented in a standard font, but there is scope for further work that presents the brand names in their usual configurations and examines whether this makes them easier to recognise.”

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