Brand Suicide? Negative Brand Names Influence Consumer Perception and Memory

Brand names can convey important attributes of a product, and can more generally impact the brand image itself. For instance, brand names such as Dove and Apple implicitly convey positivity. However, some products are marketed with distinctly negative brand names, such as Burn energy drink, Fat Bastard chardonnay, and Poison perfume. What are the consequences of such negative brand names for consumer behavior? Might they bestow certain benefits that outweigh their negative associations? I will report a series of behavioral experiments that investigate this question. Specifically, we investigated whether attitudes to negative brand names would improve across repeated exposures (Experiment 1), whether negative brand names and their perceptual and contextual details are preferentially remembered (Experiment 2), and how the evaluation of negatively named products interacts with brand personality (Experiment 3) and participant personality (Experiment 4). Overall, the results indicate that negative brand names are quickly habituated, are better remembered, and are preferred for exciting brands and by secure individuals. These studies thus reveal the advantages of negative brand names and the marketing conditions under which they are most likely to succeed.