دانلود رایگان مقاله اثرات تعیین کلی خودارجاعی در قضاوت برند

abstract

The present research extends previous work on the latent tendency to be attracted to objects, events and entities that are associated with the self by demonstrating when and how generic self-referencing brand names influence brand judgment. In five studies we hypothesize and find that using pronouns in brand names that refer to the consumer's self (i.e., ‘I’ or ‘my’ as in ‘iTunes’ or ‘MySpace’) produces an attraction effect and promotes favorable brand responses. The strength of the effect hinges on the extent to which the consumer's self-view is positive. In addition, we test a logical extension of the effect and show that attraction turns into avoidance when consumers' acute self-view is negative, particularly for products for which the association with the consumer's self is more salient, i.e., self-expressive products.

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.