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Background
What were smartphones, Apps, and Alzheimer's disease (and
drugs against it) before they became known as... exactly that?
“Having a name for it” is not just a matter of putting labels on
objects and phenomena in the infinite variety of reality. It is a
matter of categorizing such objects and phenomena, (re)identifying
them at each new encounter, making sense of them, and encompassing
them into our minds by relating them to our reasoning, values, and
personal goals. In all but a trivial sense, this is tantamount to
creating them as objects of human thought and action. When planted
in the minds of other people, they will be remembered and affect
the way they see things, possibly overshadowing competing names and
other ways of seeing the “same” things. In turn, any act of naming
involves framing in two distinct, but closely related respects.
First, the origin, composition, and sometimes even sound of a new
name will often frame whatever it denotes in a certain way, adding
particular shades of meanings and positive or negative value to it,
e.g., Whopper,
green taxes, humanitarian bombings,
or lame duck. Yet since a name cannot “say”
everything in itself, the final outcome will also strongly depend
on how the name itself is framed by other words and sentences and
by pictures, films, oral explanations, first-hand sensory
experiences, packaging and homepage design, and other multimodal
cues. This is what has turned McDonalds into
more than just some family name and what makes many people
understand global warming as a threat to
humanity rather than an opportunity to develop seaside resort
tourism in Northern countries.
State of the art
The importance of naming and framing decisions is
highly appreciated in a number of practice-oriented
fields spanning from product development, marketing, branding, and
advertising to corporate communication, PR, lobbyism, politics,
journalism, didactics and the development of professional
terminologies. However, with a few exceptions, the issue is dealt
with on a “strategic” level while the linguistic and
socio-cognitive mechanisms determining the success or failure of
concrete naming & framing solutions are mostly approached in
anecdotic common-sense terms. Nevertheless, essential analytical
tools and empirical insights may be drawn upon from more basic
language, cognition, and communication research targeting e.g.
people’s spontaneous interpretation and acceptance or rejection of
new names and the role of surrounding verbal and visual cues in
these processes, and how the cultural and structural specifics may
both promote and obscure the successful implementation of naming
and framing decisions across cultures.
Aims and content
The course aims at presenting some of the
abovementioned insights in a concise and comprehensive
form and relate them to the real-life naming and framing challenges
encountered in the practice-oriented fields mentioned
initially.
The course will supply the participants with analytical skills
and operational tools that will enable them to contribute
constructively and suggest new ideas for the planning,
implementation and evaluation of naming and framing decisions for a
variety of purposes in private enterprises, public
organizations, and NGOs.
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