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The name of COVID-19

One of the problems of social psychologists is to achieve customer loyalty to a brand, this being the one we use to identify a certain person, product or company.

Normally when we think of a company like Coca-Cola, McDonald or Ikea, we usually do it with respect to the products they sell. If we look at other brands such as U.P.S., Iberia or Microsoft, we do it on the services they offer.

Something that will decisively influence the acquisition of the product or service in question, not only based on our own criteria, but also on the influence of the opinion of others and the media through advertising.

Likewise, when we think of Stephen Hawking, Barack Obama or Rafael Nadal, we no longer do so in products or services, if not because of their Personal Branding or personal brand that they have developed thanks to their scientific, political or sports careers respectively, that is, emotional aspects are associated with the brand, which can be linked to a person, company and even location.

Well, the same happens when “misfortunes” are to be called, as happens when designating tropical cyclones that annually hit a large part of the Caribbean and North America.

As reported by the World Meteorological Organization (World Meteorological Organization, 2020), these names follow pre-established lists that rotate, leaving in many the memory of the effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or Ike in 2008.

Therefore, in principle, these names are not related to the date on which it occurs, the violence or the areas most affected, among these there are English or Spanish (for example, Barry or Gonzalo respectively), male or female (for example , Lorenzo or Laura respectively), but does the name of tropical cyclones have an impact on the population?

This is what has been trying to find with an investigation carried out by the Department of Administration and Companies; in conjunction with the Department of Psychology, the Communications Research Institute, and the Women and Gender Surveys Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois; together with the Department of Statistics of the Arizona State University (USA) (Jung, Shavitt, Viswanathan, & Hilbe, 2014).

The study analysed the climatic consequences of hurricanes in the United States during the last six decades, differentiating them based on masculine and feminine names, first finding that those with feminine names had been the ones that had led to the greatest destructive effects and deaths.

It must be remembered that the list of names is predetermined and that their assignment is consecutive, so a priori there is no relationship between the gender of the name and its violence, so the most surprising thing about the study is that they passed a list of names of hurricanes, 5 male and 5 female to 346 participants, so that they assessed through a Likert-type scale from 1 to 7 to what extent each of the hurricanes on the list was considered violent.

The results show that hurricanes with male names tended to be valued as more destructive than those with female names, regardless of the gender of the participants.

Which allowed us to understand why sometimes when faced with notices from the authorities, more or less attention is usually paid to prevention, for example, simply because the assigned name is male or female.

On the other hand, the name of diseases in the health field is usually indicated by acronyms that are related to some identifying characteristic of the site, symptoms or consequences.

Thus, and within the family of coronaviruses, there have been several outbreaks before, such as in the case of SARS-CoV that emerged in China in 2002, whose initials correspond to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus and which refers to its symptoms; the MERS-CoV that arose in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and whose initials in English refer to the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, where the symptoms and location are described; and the COVID-19 that emerged in 2019 in China whose initials in English refer to the Coronavirus Disease of 2019, without making any indication of the symptoms or the town where it arose.

It should be taken in mind that the term COVID-19 has not been the first to be used for this disease but rather it has been a change introduced almost two months after the first case reported to the WHO emerged, which has led to some proposing that the motivations for modifying it by incorporating an “official” name could have been carried out to avoid the negative economic consequences of associating a type of disease with a region or population (@radioyskl, 2020) (see Illustration 6).

In this way, the aim would be to eliminate the names of “China virus” or “Wuhan virus”, terms that point directly to the source of the infection.

A deference to China that some health professionals denounce, for not having the same consideration with other populations as in the case of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus.

Despite the fact that an official name of COVID-19 has been given, the population has continued to use the denomination of Viruses and especially Coronavirus to learn about the symptoms, prevention measures or extension of the disease, and although it is still too early to understand the reason why the official name has “failed”.

Illustration 6. Tweet Name of COVID-19

It must be taken into account that in order to create a new brand and get adherence to it, a series of variables must be addressed, as has been analysed by the University of Taylor (Malaysia) (Poon, 2016) with an investigation where an attempt has been made to find out the motivations for the success of certain brands compared to the rest, for this purpose, a list of fifty best-selling products for daily use was selected, from the two main marketing companies, to verify the effects of the brand.

After analysing the messages, pamphlets and advertising that are disseminated about these two brands by the media and the networks, it was found through the application of textual analysis and the interpretive method, that these brands were based on two pillars to maintain the loyalty of its customers.

The first one is the ability to generate positive emotions; and the second was that of the aesthetics of honesty, that is, it appears that the product actually serves what it indicates, maintaining the advertised quality standards.

Regarding the credibility of the WHO, indicate that according to the survey carried out by WIN / Gallup International (UN, 2014), this organization together with UNICEF are the highest valued international agencies worldwide, showing how 72% of those interviewed had good opinion of these organisms.

Therefore, it would be expected that citizens will gradually adopt this last name, taking into account the delay that occurred between the announcements of its official name made on February 11, 2020 (see

Illustration 6), while the worldwide concern began almost a month earlier, on January 20, 2020, in turn, almost a month after the first case was reported on December 31, 2019.