We expect chocolate brand names with "harsher" syllables to taste bitter

Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

Be it the signature sweetness of a Kit Kat or the refreshing crunch of a Twix bar, chocolate brand names connect with customers by revealing something about their product. The sound of a brand name gives customers clues as to how it might taste—meaning that companies can tailor their brand names to fit their customers’ expectations.  

Take these two hypothetical chocolate brand names, for instance: Biduze and Pituse. Which brand would you expect to be the sweeter chocolate and which is more bitter? It turns out that the specific sounds used in different chocolate brand names affect people’s expectations about their taste. The brand name “Biduze” contains phonetic building blocks that are voiced. This means that, if you place your fingers against your throat, you’ll feel it vibrate when you say “Biduze” out loud. Words with voiced consonants are lower in frequency, and tend to be associated with harshness—meaning that we relate them more to a bitter taste. In contrast, the brand name “Pituse” has voiceless syllables that we can pronounce without any vibration from our throat. These voiceless consonants are “softer” and are associated with a sweet taste.

In a recent study, researchers tested whether individuals would associate chocolate brand names with “harsher” voiced syllables with a bitter taste, and names with “softer” voiceless syllables with a sweet taste. They had participants sort a list of made-up brand names based on whether they thought they represented sweet or bitter chocolates. Half of the names were made up of only voiced syllables, and the other half were made up of only voiceless syllables. Then, they asked participants to come up with their own brand names for sweet and bitter chocolates using voiced or voiceless syllables. 

The researchers found that people tended to sort chocolate names with more voiced syllables into the bitter chocolate category.  In addition, participants’ original names for bitter chocolates tended to have a significantly higher amount of the voiced syllables. This suggests that customers would expect a brand name with lots of voiced syllables—like Dubazi, Zibedu, or Voguda—to represent a bitter-tasting chocolate.  The individual syllables of a chocolate’s brand name could be giving customers hints about how it tastes. One thing’s for sure: there may be more to a box of chocolates than meets the eye.