Predicting the Memorability of Brand Slogans

One component of a brand’s identity is its slogan, and an important desideratum for the slogan is that it is memorable. The authors develop predictive models of how well a slogan is remembered and to what extent it cues its brand. To do so, they identify proposed memorability factors through a systematic literature review and operationalize them using a combination of natural language processing, human ratings, and constructs derived from text embeddings. They evaluate the predictive accuracy of models that use these factors and text embeddings on recognition and cued brand recall judgments for existing slogans. The authors use these models to assess the extent to which the literature is missing textual characteristics important for predicting memorability. The models provide a tool to help marketers select between slogans, which the authors demonstrate by using them to predict the memorability of candidate slogans for new brands.