Commercial onomastics: humorous color names. Are they appreciated and do they play a role in product purchase intention?

Abstract

• Objectives / Research Questions Commercial onomastics, the disciplinary field focusing on names in the commercial sphere, plays an increasingly important role in how brands communicate. It reflects a new trend in nominative logic that uses color naming combined with humor to cause an attraction effect through an offbeat or shifted vision (one pertinent example of this can be seen with the pun-based brand name “Maliblue”). The present article will examine the influence of humorous color-naming and the effects of different humor mechanisms (humor based on incongruity resolution or relief theory) on consumption behaviors. • Methodology The study used a sample of 1,432 individuals. Four lexical creativity workshops (N=100) generated 145 humorous color names for a refreshing non-alcoholic fruit drink. A first pretest (N=266) evaluated the humorous nature of these names, which allowed the most relevant ones to be selected. A second pretest (N=226) used the measurement scale developed by Spielmann (2014) to categorize the names according to one of the two humor mechanisms and tested the handling quality of the independent variables before the final experiment. The final study (N=840) involved a 4 x 3 between-subjects (four colors and three types of color denominations) and empirically tested the research hypotheses. •