How creative are communication firms? An empirical test of Zipf’s Law in Spanish advertising and public relations sectors

Abstract

Company names constitute one of the earliest and most enduring forms of corporate communication. Before organisations engage in formal messaging or stakeholder interaction, their legal names function as symbolic signals of identity and differentiation. Prior research has treated naming mainly as an individual strategic or branding decision, paying limited attention to system-level communicative patterns across industries. This study examines corporate naming as a system-level communicative phenomenon and examines symbolic differentiation in Spain’s advertising, public relations, and communication sectors. The analysis covers 26,432 firms founded between 1975 and 2023. Names are analysed using Zipf’s Law, with lexical concentration indicating communicative saturation or differentiation. Temporal regimes are identified through structural break analysis, and Zipfian coefficients are estimated across periods and regions. Results show consistently low lexical concentration, consistent with a relatively differentiated naming repertoire. Regional variation is observed in the estimated coefficients. Equal-sized Monte Carlo subsampling shows that unequal sample sizes account for part of the original regional dispersion, but pooled interaction models and pairwise comparisons indicate that residual regional heterogeneity remains after controlling for sample size. Lexical concentration also follows a non-linear temporal trajectory, increasing during the expansion years preceding the 2008 financial crisis and declining thereafter. The regional evidence is therefore interpreted as statistically supported but moderate heterogeneity rather than as an invariant ranking of regional naming systems, whereas the temporal patterns remain descriptive.