A Study On Trademarks From The Perspective Of Memetics

Trademarks, as the remarkable and significant symbols of products, applied byproducers and operators to distinct their own goods from others, exert some influenceon consumers’ purchase of goods. Scholars at home and abroad have exploredtrademarks from a variety of perspectives. By drawing on previous research results,this thesis attempts to study trademarks from a new angle-memetics.Memetics is a new theory to explicate the evolutionary mechanisms of culturefrom Darwinism and, a meme is a unit of cultural information, existing by imitationand transmission. Memetically, language itself is a meme and the medium of memetransmission. Language memes can be expressed by words, phrases, idioms,sentences, paragraphs and even texts, as long as they can be imitated and transmitted.Trademarks are closely related with memes, especially language memes.Based on the selection theory of Heylighen and the language memetics, this thesisfirst explores the interrelation between language, trademarks and memes, andconcludes that a trademark itself is a languge meme. And in order to be expressed andtransmissed by more consumers, trademark memes need to satisfy some selectioncriteria, such as novelty, simplicity and coherence. Additionally, by its very nature, atrademark meme is not only a language phenomenon, but also a social-culturalphenomenon. Therefore, combining with memetics, this thesis also elaborates culturalfactors that should be considered for creating and transmitting trademarks incross-cultural context. Upon the above analysis, this study concludes three principlesfor creating strong trademark memes. Major findings, limitations of the present studyand suggestions for further studies are also discussed in the thesis.Memetics has provided a new tool for studying trademarks. It is hoped that thepresent thesis will offer some insight to trademark designers to create competitivetrademarks, and to business English learners and instructors to learn and understandbusiness English especially trademarks better.