Naming strategies of residential developments : Is there a winning formula?

Abstract

In recent times, private residential developers in Singapore have been adopting various types of naming strategies when christening their residential projects. Some of these distinctive naming strategies would include using foreign sounding names in an attempt to evoke a sense of sophistication and prestige. Faced with an increasingly strict set of naming rules set out by the Street and Building Names Board (SBNB), developers are also forced to think out of the box and adopt fanciful names for their projects in an effort to satisfy both the legal authorities as well as consumers. While intensive academic research has been done on how the name of product would affect a consumer’s attitude, much of this research has been on commoditized consumer products and little has been done on heterogeneous products like real estate. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate the perception consumers have on the naming tactics adopted by developers in recent times and the degree of influence the name of a project has on a consumer’s purchase decision. Upon using attitudinal assessment techniques like the semantic differential methodology, it was discovered in this study that consumers have a stronger preference for foreign sounding names. On the contrary, while coined up names offers excellent legal compliance advantages to the developers, respondents in the study considered the names inferior as compared to the other types of names. The findings of the survey have also revealed that the co-branding and centralized branding strategies are viable options that residential developers can further dwell into.