11. General discussion
The present research extends previous research by examining whether generic references to the self as intrinsic components of brand names influence brand judgment, and systematically explores the conditions that qualify such a generic self-referencing effect. Building on previous research on the name letter effect and implicit egotism (Nuttin, 1985; Pelham et al., 2002), we hypothesized that more generic references to the consumer's self in brand names, and more specifically first person pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘my’, would similarly induce self-associations and affect brand judgment through a process of associative self-anchoring (Gawronski et al., 2007). Given the assumption that the self-referencing effect has a self-evaluative basis, we expected the bias in brand judgment to reflect the valence of consumers' self-view, such that consumers with a favorable self-view would consider self-referencing brand names more attractive and, conversely, that consumers with a negative selfview should show the opposite and would consider these selfreferencing brand names as less attractive, thus reflecting an avoidance orientation. While the former effect was postulated to be likely observed for both chronic and acute higher levels of (explicit and implicit) self-esteem, the latter effect was deemed more plausible when conditions actively fostered its detection, i.e., when zoomingin on acute low self-esteem, and when consumers rated brands of self-expressive (rather than non-self-expressive) products.
