In the current issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, University of Waterloo social psychologist Grainne Fitzsimons writes that the psychological effect of brands might "extend to behaviours unrelated to the products the brand represents.... If a consumer drives past a FedEx logo, will he drive faster? If he drinks from a can or Pepsi at a work meeting, will he behave more youthfully?"
Prof. Fitzsimons -- whose work is in the area of social psychology that deals with "priming," in which a person's behaviour is shaped by the thought of other people in their lives, such as a student who concentrates harder and does better on a test when primed to think of his mother -- wondered whether the most successful brands might have a similar subconscious power.
"We were thinking they might, because marketers spend a lot of time trying to cultivate these brand personalities," she said in an interview. "They work really hard to convince us that Apple is about being creative and Levi's is being all-American. And we started wondering whether that on its own might be sufficient, so if you are primed with one of these brands, you might actually start behaving like the personality you associate with the brand."
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