A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Or would it?

3 minute read

Are customers really the King or do they get taken for a Royal Ride?

For some time now, marketers and advertisers in their quest to make their products stand out, have started to rely heavily on pretension to convey the discerning nature of their products.

One technique marketers often use is attaching super pretentious product descriptors to ordinary products. Think of Milanese Biscuits, Flaked coffee crystals or even fancy restaurant menu items like Harissa Fried Chicken.

A set of researchers decided to test the efficacy of this commonly used marketing gimmick. They decided to test whether adding a pretentious and potentially unrelated product descriptor had an impact on the pricing expectations and also, expectations on product quality. The common belief in the marketing circles is that attaching an eclectic or premium sounding product descriptor would positively impact consumers’ perception of product quality and lend a premiere air to the product.

To test this common tactic, researchers enlisted a group of students. These students were divided into 2 groups.

The first group was the control group who were shown a picture of a brown paper bag which they were told, contained corn bread mix. They were subsequently asked to answer a couple of questions where they had to rate the bag from 1-7 on how expensive they thought the corn bread mix would be (1 being not expensive at all and 7 being very expensive). They were also asked to answer the question “How tasty do you think this product is?” on a scale of 1-7 (1 being Not tasty at all and 7 being Very tasty).

The test group was asked the same questions however there was one small distinction in their experiment. When they were shown the picture of the corn bread mix the researchers attached an unrelated (random) 3 letter product descriptor to test the common marketing gimmick.

The results of the experiment confirmed the test group that was exposed to the product along with the meaningless/eclectic product descriptor had a higher price perception (3.06 vs 2.02), thereby confirming the theory that vague product descriptors lent a premium air to products and how customers perceive their pricing. However, the surprising result was that even though the group expected the product with the vague/meaningless descriptor to be more expensive they expected less taste/satisfaction from the said product.

This finding runs contrary to the common marketing belief that adding premium sounding vague product descriptors improves product quality perception which in turn would lead to a higher willingness to purchase.

Some food for thought for you product marketers when trying to decide a name for your new product :) .

Original research by Ernest Baskin, Peggy J. Liu

https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jcpy.1217