László Kovács

László Kovács, applied linguist. He studied German language and literature, and received his PhD in 2011 in the field of psycholinguistics, researching network structures of the mental lexicon. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at iASK, Complexity and Big Data Centre. Previously he conducted research at the University of West Hungary, at the Università degli Studi di Udine and at the Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen. His main research area is the cognitive representation of words and brand names. He is the author of a monograph, of several language text books and the author or co-author of more than 60 research papers and book chapters.

Brand names in a cognitive context

Brand names are the most valuable assets a company has. Recent research on brands agrees that brands are more than just the products we can touch: brands – and brand names – can be regarded as cognitive constructs residing in our minds.

This cognitive context of brand names is a research area which needs interdisciplinary approaches: methods of linguistic analyses (psycholinguistic research, research on the mental lexicon) and cognitive analyses (cognitive categorization, conceptual frames, cognitive networks) have to be implemented to brand names, and the results need to be evaluated in light of product, product class and brand communication strategy.

Despite the fact that several researchers underline the importance of the cognitive representation of brand names, there is almost no (public) empirical research done on this topic, thus for an independent researcher no or just little guidance is given, how to conduct researches on brand associations.

The aim of the research is to fill this gap by constructing a theoretical framework for brand association research and analyzing the cognitive context(s) of brand names.