Experimental Decoding of Nominator’s Intention: Names of Siberian Lawyer Firms

Most effective brands of legal organizations evoke a stable correlation between the nominator’s intentions and the clients’ perception. By analyzing the way recipients decode the nominator’s intentions, the authors identified potential naming risks in the sphere of lawyer firms. The methodology consisted of three steps: 1)        identifying the nominator’s intentions, explicitly and implicitly presented on the firm’s website; 2) a free association experiment, identifying associative dominants and correlating them with the nominator’s attitudes; 3) identifying decoding strategies to assess their effectiveness. The verification experiment featured 100 students of philology (Kemerovo State University), who were offered two law firm brands, PRIM Group and Glauks, as verbal stimuli. The associative-figurative names of foreign origin proved difficult to perceive and resulted in inaccurate decoding of the nominator’s intention. Linguistic markers of such difficulties manifested at the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and punctuation levels. The respondents used four strategies to decode the nominator’s intentions: linguistic, cultural, paronymic, and sympractical. Only the first two resulted in a relatively accurate explication of the meanings intended by the nominators. The linguistic, cultural, and professional barriers included the lack of knowledge of a foreign language, mythology, education, etc. Therefore, marketeers should take into account the receptive capabilities of the potential clients; only in this case will the name be effective in both communicative and marketing terms.

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