Why bouba and kiki matter
Experiment time! Here are two shapes:
One of these is bouba and one of these is kiki. Which is which? Take the rounded, blobby one: without really thinking about what these words mean, is it bouba, or is it kiki?
If you said bouba, then the vast majority of the people in this world — over 85% — will agree with you. The effect has been observed in a remote Namibian tribe with no written language and in kids as young as 2 ½.
So what’s going on? Pete and I recently presented to an interdisciplinary Oxford University seminar on aesthetics, discussing our multi-sensory exhibition Tate Sensorium. It turns out that synesthesia is behind both the Sensorium and bouba/kiki. While a small percentage of the population have diagnosable synesthesia (connecting, say, colours and sounds), it seems that all of us forge at least some kinds of links between the senses — cross-modal connections, in the lingo — which experiments like bouba/kiki bring to the surface: something we discussed at length with the psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists in Oxford.
What’s weird, though, is once you get into it, bouba/kiki starts appearing everywhere. Professor Charles Spence explored the phenomenon in taste. Consider which of the following is bouba, and which is kiki:
- Dark chocolate / milk chocolate
- Strong cheddar / brie
- Sparkling water / still water
Spence’s research found the former in each case to be kiki — to be like an angular shape, generally triggered by bitter or sour tastes. Meanwhile sweeter tastes tended to be more rounded, or organic.
Is any of this useful in a marketing context? Absolutely. Spence points out that lots of “kiki” products have kiki branding — consciously or otherwise: consider the pointed stars of San Pellegrino, Heineken and Sapporo. Not all do, however: Carlsberg’s flowing text feels somewhat more bouba to me. There’s connotations for language — naming, taglines — as well.
But perhaps more important is how intuitive all this might appear. Sometimes during a creative process, something just feels right, even if that feeling can’t be justified. What you might be feeling is something universal — a bouba-ness or kiki-ness or another psychological phenomenon you’re not aware of. It’s tempting in an age of data to prove everything, but sometimes, if it feels right, you just have to go with it.
Read more:
A great New Scientist piece on bouba and kiki
Professor Spence’s paper on the subject
Ask yourself or your colleagues: are the following more bouba or kiki — and why?
- A banana
- The Labour Party
- ITV
- Metallica
