Our work has evolved in the last 30 years, from reducing prejudice to tackling systemic injustice. The start of the school year is an important time to remember that names have meaning—whether they belong to monuments, mountains or to your own students. Sara Wicht. September 9, The victor writes the story. The oppressed becomes invisible. Until now. What can educators do about it? Try these discussion questions with students: Who named [monument]?
For what purpose? What is the relationship between the person who named [monument] and the monument itself? Who is erased from the history? Who is present? What other history is this like? What is the social or cultural context of this history? How is this history relevant to today? How might frequently silenced voices be heard through using these questions in discussions about other historical topics?
Numerous research studies have been conducted on this very subject. In one, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research sent out nearly 5, resumes in response to job ads in Boston and Chicago. In another study, a team of researchers from the US, Austria and Belgium demonstrated that people with easier-to-pronounce names tend to be evaluated more positively than people with harder-to-pronounce names.
The more effort we need to put into understanding something, then the less likely we are to believe it. All words have a psychological effect. They are composed of shapes and sounds that trigger an emotional response. We then make all kinds of assumptions about the word based on its composition. We know no words. If I say cat or dog to you, then depending on childhood experiences you either have positive or negative associations and emotions.
This is the whole premise around implicit-association tests. A company or brand name is no different. A brand name can persuade us to engage emotionally with a company despite us knowing little about the product itself. Our mind works like a thesaurus, and remembers the meaning rather than the individual words per se. A name without an emotional, non-verbal association will not be retained.
A symbiotic relationship is necessary to embed it. A good example is Apple. Apples are associated with fruit, fruitfulness, freshness, good health and sweetness. All positive attributes for a fresh computer brand as it was at launch seeking to deliver a healthy operating system.
Unless these words are total fabrications, words or part of words will always have emotional associations based on past experiences and imagery. You just need to know what these are and adapt accordingly. Research has established that brand names are neurologically processed in a different way to common nouns. The right brain, associated with processing items of personal importance and emotional significance, is used more extensively, supporting the idea that we form emotional links with brands in a large part to their names.
It differentiates you from your competitors and gets customers interested or at least curious. The name is not the brand, but a shortcut to the brand promise. Sometimes, the brand name is so apt and describes what it does so well that customers call all similar products by the same name. Google is the universal term for internet searches, Saran Wrap in the US for all plastic cling film and Hoover in the UK for all vacuum cleaners, and as a verb to describe the process.
What do you do if you need to rename your brand, or create a brand from scratch? Choosing a name is a hard but important step as it represents what your brand stands for. Pick the wrong one and you might as well shut up shop. Many now-famous brands started out life under a different guise. Whether the name change precipitated their infamy, who knows. Can you identify who these companies eventually became? Mr Nemtsov was an opposition politician , murdered outside the Kremlin in One politician in Moscow called the name change "a dirty trick".
These are just the latest examples of the centuries-old recognition of the power and importance of names. If you search online for the address of the United Kingdom embassy in Tehran, Iran, you'll be told that it's Ferdowsi Avenue. Iranians got good at changing names in the early s. Thousands of streets and buildings named for the regime of the deposed shah were instead dedicated to mark the Islamic revolution.
In what was originally a prank, a group of students changed the signs where the British embassy was located to read "Bobby Sands Street", after the high-profile IRA activist who died in prison on hunger strike while serving a sentence for firearms offences. Weirdly, the name stuck. So instead of having an official address which memorialised someone who considered the British state the enemy, British embassy staff decided to start using the back door instead, thereby changing their postal address.
And as Ferdowsi is considered to be the Persian national poet, perhaps they reasoned a street named after him was safe from being changed. If renaming streets is controversial, renaming whole countries is critical. Burkina Faso - or land of the upright people - tells us that this is a country no longer colonised by another nation - the French - who decided that the best way to denote the territory would be a purely geographical one.
The break-up of Yugoslavia in the s revived the idea of Macedonia as a nation. But Macedonia is also the name of the bordering region of Greece. So what to call the new country?
Independent Macedonia? Republic of Macedonia? Negotiations over the use of the name have been going on ever since with little sign of a breakthrough - until now.
0コメント