Tuesday, July 22, 2014

What's in a Name? A lot!

Just came across this interesting post on the Advanced Marketing Institute website. Thought you would find it interesting.


Unique Marketing Test Reveals Likely Election Winner.
The Secret? One Name Captures the Emotions of Voters.

How do you reach inside the mind of voters to determine who they will vote for, even before they may even know themselves?

That is the particularly intriguing question faced by hundreds, even thousands of pollsters, not to mention politicians. As the public is exposed to the daily, hourly barrage of skittishly jumping results of the polls, there seems to be no way to measure what will happen, except to say it is "virtually a dead heat."

Hakim Chishti, Executive Director of the research firm Advanced Marketing Institute (AMI) believes his form picked the likely winner. And it will not be anywhere near a "too close to call election." In fact, according to Chishti, "one of the candidates is three more times more likely to be chosen in this election."

“It’s All in the Sound of Your Voice”

According to Chishti, "Going all the way back to Plato, it has been known that our emotions are affected by the actual sound of words; the tones within words 'mean' something to us, regardless of which language is being spoken, and regardless of whether we even know the
language."

Chishti, who is fluent in several Near Eastern languages and a US Government Fulbright Research Scholar, says "I became interested in the harmonics of languages, when in my travels I found that people had emotional reactions to languages which they did not know."

Phonetic Symbolism: the Key to the Emotional ‘Meaning’ of Words

In linguistics this phenomenon is known as "phonetic symbolism." Marketers and researchers for decades have used this awareness to develop brand names and evaluate marketing communications. Russian researchers discovered that these sound affect a child while it is still in its mothers womb.

While the effects of spoken words on our emotions can be profound, understanding the specific mechanics of how sounds produce specific emotional reactions has been an elusive goal for researchers.

200,000 Words Analyzed for Emotional Impact

In the 1990s, Dr. Chishti led his team of researchers at the Advanced Marketing Institute to develop special algorithms. Based upon research at Bell Labs, Chishti's computer experts analyzed the tonal qualities in more than 200,000 words in the English language, and the specific centers in the mind and body activate by specific waveforms made by each sound.

The Advanced Marketing Institute provides a free analysis tool online which provides free evaluation of headlines. Site visitors run more than 30,000 headlines through the tool each month, to improve the emotional connection of their marketing slogans with potential customers.

The analysis results provide a breakdown of words into three categories - those affecting the emotional, intellectual and spiritual centers of a person. Based upon these criteria, Chishti's firm provides special computer analysis to Fortune 100 clients and others. The results are stated as an "Index" for each component of the emotional value of a particular series of words.

“Inside the Mind of the Marketplace” (And Voters)

According to Chishti, this type of research provides very deep insight into how customers interact with products, services, and other people. "We call this analysis "Inside the Mind of The Marketplace," Chishti said.

"It was possible for us to evaluate, as just one example," said Chishti, "political candidate's speeches, to discern how emotional, or intellectual or spiritual their communication is."

Chishti also said, "If you also evaluate the blog posts
of a candidates' web site, one can more fully match the communication style of prospective voters. That is a considerable advantage."

So after an evaluation of all the candidates' speeches and all of the campaigning across millions of miles and thousands of hours of stale dinners and limp shrimp, which candidate does Chishti predict will be the winner?

“It’s all in the name …”

"Of course many factors influence an election," he said. "The area we thought most relevant was the name of the candidate himself. Since this is the most obvious and often-repeated aspect of everyone's connection to a candidate, we wanted to get to the core perception for each candidate. We felt the name provided just such a focus.

And Chishti revealed to us that purely in terms of the harmonics of the names, one candidate is a clear winner, and overwhelming winner. And that is Senator Barak Obama.

"At least according to the science of linguistics and our computer analysis of how people respond emotionally, Sen. Barak Obama's name has an overall emotional content index value of 150%, whereas John McCain's rating is only 50%."

Candidate’s name “off the charts in terms of emotional appeal…”

To put that in perspective, even the best copywriters attain an index rating of around 30%. So while McCain's name is not necessarily weak, the harmonic strength of Obama's name if essentially off the charts. You practically could not have invented a more emotionally connective name for a political candidate," said Chishti.

"Without getting too technical about it all" Chishti said, "simply in terms the emotional, heartfelt connection, common people have three times the "emotional" connection with Sen. Obama."

Though considered ‘intellectual’, people ‘feel’ him as the more as emotional and empathetic candidate.”

Even more interesting, said Chishti, is that we can further break down the specific format of emotions, into heartfelt qualities or emotions, intellectual values and spiritual values. "Interestingly, " even though Obama is considered the "intellectual" of the candidates, his name conveys only "emotional" or heartfelt values to people.

"Perhaps that explains to some extent the rising tide of veneration enjoyed by the Obama campaign, and the large crowds, their sense of commonality of purpose and community exhibited by the huge crowds he draws," Chishti said.



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