From across the Atlantic there comes news of consumer psychology of a particular kind, writes David Cohen. At Insead, France*s flagship business school, four researchers have discovered that people prefer products whose brands share letters with their own name. Their findings have just been published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Principal investigator Miguel Brendl, whose
expertise lies in the psychological foundations of consumer behaviour, oversaw taste tests of 160 student volunteers, who were asked to rank 18 mass produced candy products. In all, his team found, more than one third chose an item whose first letter was the same as the one in their first name. For example, a blogger named David might like Dunkin doughnuts more than Cadbury chocolates.
Or as the groundbreaking article*s abstract
helpfully puts it: *We propose that during a first stage an active need to self-enhance increases the positive valence of name letters themselves and that during stage 2 positive name letter valence
transfers to product-specific attributes (e.g., taste of a beverage).
Accordingly, when respondents form a brand preference (e.g., of beverages), activating a product-specific need (e.g., need to drink) boosts the influence of this (transferred) valence.
