The importance of global marketing has contributed to growth in research on cultural influences on consumer behavior and how members of different cultures respond to

Sound symbolism, the linguistic process in which the sounds of a word provide cues about the word’s meaning, is not a new phenomenon. Plato first described the effect in the dialogues of Cratylus, and authors throughout time have used the sounds in words to describe people (e.g., the miniature Lilliputians and the giant Brobdingnagians in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) and objects (e.g., the large, dangerous Bludgers, the big, round Quaffle, and the small, fast Golden Snitch in the Quidditch game in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) represented by those words. When presented with fictitious or unfamiliar words, individuals consistently use sound symbolism to interpret meanings from the name about the referenced object (Jacobson and Waugh 1987; Sapir 1929). The effect is extremely well documented whether the tested individual’s native language

this article, it would be pos- sible to generalize the present findings beyond the usage of standard Mandarin. In addition, we also encourage researchers to move beyond the broad concepts of phonetic, semantic, and phonosemantic translations and examine specific types of sound translations (e.g., high versus low tones, rhymes versus no rhymes) and types of meanings and associations (e.g., metaphorical versus literal, idiomatic versus formal). As these specific types of sounds and meanings are more closely related to social and cultural meanings than the broad structural approach taken in the current study, possible interactions can be expected between linguistic factors and cultural variables that determine different interpretations of the linguistic meanings

this article. We thank Ellie Y. Fang, Hisako Fujii, and Simon Novell for helping to construct the stimuli and Yulde Saito, Sally Li, and Ivy Fei for helping to collect data. We also thank Sebastian Ceria and the Center for Foreign Languages Teaching at Columbia University for assisting in recruiting participants and Gayan Fitzsimons and Carolyn Cohen for helpful comments. This research was supported by grants from the Institute for Marketing Studies of Columbia Business School, the Marketing Studies Center at UCLA, the BAT Chair of Marketing at CEIBS, and the UCLA Center for International Business Education and Research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Shi Zhang, 110 Westwood Plaza B412, UCLA-Anderson School of Management, Los Ange- les, California 90095-1481. Electronic mail may be' sent to shi.zhang@anderson.ucla.edu. driven, bottom-up point of view; people construct categories by detecting the inherent structure among objects in the real 'world (Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Later research adopted a conceptdriven, top-down approach that focused on the formation of new categories out of existing knowledge structures and theories (Barsalou, '1983; Murphy & Medin, 1985). Common to both approaches is the view that in explaining categorization, it is sufficient to focus on conceptual knowledge as such; concepts are treated as distinct and isolated from other cognitive domains, most importantly language. The current view of categorization is quite different from the perspective that prevailed in psychology and the social sciences half a century ago. Then, it was believed that there was a strong relation between grammatical or structural features of a language and category formation--a hypothesis that has been expressed most succinctly by Sapir and Wh...

In recent years, there has been a wealth of research examilling the relevance of culture to consumer behavior. This chapter reviews a particular line of work within this larger body of research: work investigating the unique reJevance of language. Our review fillds that both structural features of language

VVL/BBDO funded this research. To examine the impact of offline URL advertising, a quantitative study among internet users and non-users is carried out. For internet users, the results reveal a significant impact on each level of the hierarchy of effects. Respondents remembering an offline URL ad are more aware and have a higher knowledge of the site, show a more positive attitude towards the site, and indicate a higher intention to visit/revisit the site. Remarkably, offline URL advertising not only is able to attract internet users to the site the first time, but also to generate an impact over and above site experience by increasing the likelihood of revisiting the site. For internet non-users, offline URL advertising is significantly less effective. 3