- Imagine you work at a marketing firm and you've been tasked with choosing the names for three new products, a gourmet ice cream, a luxury car and a light beer.

The clients have already narrowed it down to two options for each product, and they want you to make the final call.

We'll come back to this in a bit, but if this was 100 years ago, the process would've been so much simpler.

You could name the product after its inventor, like the Singer sewing machine.

You could name it after the ingredients like Coca-Cola, which was originally made from the coca leaf and the kola nut, or just use whatever letter comes next in the alphabet, like Ford's Model T, which was proceeded by a less famous version called, you guessed it, the Model S. But today, naming products is both a science and an art for the companies that specialize in it, many of which employ professional linguists to make sure the names activate the deepest oldest parts of your brain.

I'm Dr.

Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Other Words."

(whimsical upbeat music) - Other words.

- Coca-Cola is one of the most recognized brand names in the world, and though it's inventor John Pemberton probably wasn't thinking of linguistics when he coined it, he did stumble upon several phonetic tricks that are standard in today's marketing industry.

The first is alliteration, the repetition of initial word sounds.

Alliteration makes phrases memorable and pleasing to the ear, and has been employed in brand names for decades.

Like Best Buy, Dunkin' Donuts, Chuck E. Cheese and WeightWatchers.

Coca-Cola also features an alternating consonant vowel consonant structure like Toyota, Gatorade, Amazon, and Sara Lee.

This sound pattern is very easy to pronounce.

In fact, it's one of the first that babies are able to replicate.

It's why Chuck E. Cheese rolls trippingly off the tongue, but Chuck Cheese sounds like a wheel of Brie hitting a wall, but what about the phonemes themselves?

Do the individual vowel and consonant sounds that make up our words matter?

Would Doca-Dola sell as well as Coca-Cola?

Surprisingly, this debate is over 2,000 years old.

In Plato's dialogue "Cratylus," two philosophers argue over whether the sounds of words are relevant to their meanings.

Hermogenes says no, that phonemes themselves are essentially arbitrary.

Socrates eventually concedes the point, yet maintains that the really good words do have sounds that match their meanings.

The example he gives is rho.

a kind of rolled R, which he claimed evoke movement and speed, like in the Greek words (speaks in Greek).

Maybe he was right.

Since today, R begins a lot of movement-related words in English too, like run, road and river, not to mention brand names like Range Rover, Reebok and Roomba.

The concept Plato was pondering is today known as phonetic symbolism or sound symbolism.

The study of whether language sounds have inherent psychological connotations.

In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure, the so-called "Father of Modern Linguistics," was skeptical of the idea, saying that, "The sign is arbitrary."

But in 1929, linguist Edward Sapir conducted a study where he showed participants two tables, a large one and a small one, and asked them, which was called mil and which one was called mal.

Over 80% of the respondents chose mil for the small table and mal for the large table.

Similar studies were conducted over the next 80 years that corroborated Sapir's findings, most notably the famous bouba-kiki test of 2001.

Speakers of English and Tamil were shown these two shapes and asked which one was named bouba and which kiki.

Over 95% of respondents agreed that the rounder shape was bouba and the spiky shape kiki, regardless of their native language.

Obviously there are some inherent association between phonemes and psychological concepts that exists across cultures, but that doesn't mean Saussure was totally wrong.

Most of our words are arbitrary.

If you were raised to call this a cat and this a dog, you wouldn't know any different.

As long as we all agree on the meanings of the words, the phonemes are pretty much irrelevant.

But when confronted with an unfamiliar word, that's when our brains grasp for any clues to the meaning, including phonetics.

Since new brand names are by definition unfamiliar, marketers are very deliberate about what subtle signals the sounds might be sending to potential customers.

And the industry has commissioned several studies over the last few decades to tease out these associations.

So what did they find?

Let's start with the vowels.

Vowels are voiced phonemes made with an open unobstructed vocal tract.

They are typically organized depending on the location of the resonant chamber created by your mouth shape.

Vowels like ee, I and eh are considered high-front while uh, oh and ah are low-back.

Study after study found that humans associate the low-back vowels with things that are large, heavy, round and masculine, and the high-front vowels with things that are small, light, thin, sharp and feminine.

That's why Sapir's subjects named the big table mal and why the vast majority of people think this looks more like a kiki than a bouba.

Consonants are formed when the vocal tract becomes obstructed.

That is when any of the articulators of your mouth and throat touch each other.

If the airflow is completely stopped and then bursts out again, the consonant is implosive.

Think P, T and K. And these are the voiceless plosives.

Your voice box doesn't vibrate when you make them.

If you add voice, you get B, D and G. Voiceless plosives are generally considered to be smaller, lighter and sharper, so they're a good fit for brands like Pepsi, Tic Tac and Kodak.

Voiced plosives are often seen as more potent or luxurious.

Think Duracell, Godiva or Balenciaga.

If the airflow is not stopped, but only restricted causing friction, the consonant is considered a ficative like F, S and sh.

Again, these are voiceless.

Their voiced counterparts are V, Z and zh.

Fricatives are considered soft, quick and airy, so they're appropriate for products like Febreze, Silk and Swiffer.

We should also give a special shout out to the M sound classified as a nasal, because air passes through your nose when you make it.

It's often associated with tasty foods, which is not surprising considering it's the sound we make when we eat something yummy.

That may be why there are so many sweets that start with M like Mars Bar, Milky Way, Mallomars, and of course, M&Ms.

At the other end of the tastiness spectrum is the diphthong iu made by combining the I and the oo vowels.

This sound doesn't get used much in marketing, perhaps because it's associated with things that are nasty or gross or ew.

Think putrid or puke or mucus.

So what about those hypothetical examples we started with?

They were taken from actual psycholinguistic studies, and the results don't just depend on the product, but how the marketers want to frame it.

If the ice cream is positioned as gourmet, participants preferred the name Frosh since the low, back vowel implies richness and creaminess, but if it's pitched as a sugarless low-fat dessert, Frish might be a better choice with its thin, light front vowel.

Similarly, participants preferred the name Bromley when the beer was described as a dark, thick ale, but for a light beer, Brimley was more popular.

And finally, if you wanted to sell a zippy sports car, the voiceless plosive T of Tarin might imply speed and agility, but if it's a luxury sedan, the voice plosive of Barin better evokes luxury like BMWs and Bentleys.

Tarin and Barin also have homophones.

To tear can mean to go fast, and Barin is an aristocratic title.

Sound symbolism helps brands make a good first impression, but they're far from rigid rules.

For example, Kleenex markets itself as light and soft, yet contains two hard, sharp K sounds, and Q-tip has that nasty ew sound even though the product is all about good hygiene.

And yet, not only did these two brands become the most famous of their kind, their names are now synonymous with the product itself, a phenomenon known as genericide.

It also happened to Band-Aid, Linoleum, Thermos and to bring it full circle, Coke, which is now used in some parts of America as a synonym for any sugary soda.

Apparently in the industry, genericide is considered a bad thing since it means your product has to essentially share your brand name with all your competitors, but I'd imagine it would still be a point of pride for whoever came up with it.

After all, they made up a word that matches the thing it describes so well even Socrates would be impressed.