Abstract
A brand series employs various letters which make such variations in brand names relatively comparable. However, scant attention has been paid to the influence of alphabetic order in a brand series on consumers’ preferences(liking). This research aims to investigate the influence of alphabetic order in a brand series on consumers’ preferences(liking) based on space–time congruity theory. With 4 experiments, this paper examines how the alphabetic order in a brand series influences consumers’ preferences(liking) and uncovers the underlying psychological mechanism that connects alphabetic order in a brand series and consumers’ preferences(liking). The findings indicate that a brand series employing a late letter receives more favors than a comparatively early letter. Newness perception mediates the effect of alphabetic order in brands on consumers’ preferences(liking). For the products which accord with “new means advantages” (the time value for these products is “new means more advantages and better performances than old”), a brand series employing a late letter receives more favors than a comparatively early letter. However, for the products which accord with “old means advantages” (the time value for these products is “old means more advantages and better performances than new”), this effect is the opposite. The effect of alphabetic order in a brand series on consumers’ preferences(liking) is only significant when consumers are in high involvement condition. The paper provides new insight into the influence of alphabetic order in a brand series on consumers’ preferences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
References
Athaide, G. A., & Klink, R. R. (2012). Creating global brand names: The use of sound symbolism. Journal of Global Marketing, 25(4), 202–212.
Ang, S. H. (1997). Chinese consumers’ perception of alpha-numeric brand names. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 14(3), 220–233. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363769710166800
Calantone, R. J., Chan, K., & Cui, A. S. (2006). Decomposing product innovativeness and its effects on new product success. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 23(5), 408–421. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5885.2006.00213.x
Carter, R. T. (2014). Will I hit my year-end numbers? A brand-performance forecasting model: The case for benchmarking sales and advertising spending. Journal of Advertising Research, 54(4), 398–406. https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-54-4-398-406
Casasanto, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2008). Time in the mind: Using space to think about time cognition. Journal of Advertising Research, 106(2), 579–593.
Celsi, R. L., & Olson, J. C. (1988). The role of involvement in attention and comprehension process. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 210–224. https://doi.org/10.1086/209158
Chang, W. L., & Lii, P. (2008). Luck of the draw: Creating Chinese brand names. Journal of Advertising Research, 48(4), 523–530.
Chen, T., Ma, K., Zheng, C., & Wang, H. (2015). The effects of sub-brands and brand name structure on extension evaluation: An empirical study based on Chinese culture. Journal of Brand Management, 22, 695–713. https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2015.34
Cohen, J. (1977). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. New York: Academic Press.
Coskuner-Balli, G., & Sandikci, Ö. (2014). The aura of new goods: How consumers mediate newness. Journal of Consumer Behavior, 13(2), 122–130. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1470
Dahl, D. W., & Moreau, P. (2002). The influence and value of analogical thinking during new product ideation. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.39.1.47.18930
Dehaene, S., Bossini, S., & Giraux, P. (1993). The mental representation of parity and number magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 122(3), 371–396. https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.122.3.371
Dinnin, A. (2009). The appeal of our new stuff: How newness creates value. Advances in Consumer Research, 36, 261–265.
Dogana, F. (1967). Psycholinguistic contributions to the problem of brand names. European Marketing Research Review, 2, 50–58.
Gatignon, H., & Robertson, T. S. (1991). Innovative Decision Processes. Prentice Hall.
Fitousi, D. (2010). Dissociating between cardinal and ordinal and between the value and size magnitude of coins. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 889–894.
Gevers, W., Reynvoet, B., & Fias, W. (2003). The mental representation of ordinal sequences is spatially organized. Cognition, 87, 87–95.
Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 558–565. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196313
Gourville, J. T. (2006). Eager sellers, stony buyers: Understanding the psychology of new product adoption. Harvard Business Review, 84(6), 98–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5890.2006.00034.x
Graf, E. M. (2006). The ontogenetic development of literal and metaphorical space in language. Gunter Narr Verlag.
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–1480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464
Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the implicit association test: An Improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0087889
Gunasti, K., & Ross, W. T. (2010). How and when alphanumeric brand names affect consumer preferences. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(6), 1177–1192. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.47.6.1177
Hayes, A. F. (2013). An introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. Guilford Press.
Jacob, S. N., & Nieder, A. (2008). The ABC of cardinal and ordinal number representations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(2), 41–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.11.006
Kara, S. (2016). Two essays on the effect of alphanumeric brand names on consumers’ brand related decisions. Doctoral Dissertations, 1070.
Kara, S., Gunasti, K., & Ross, W. T. (2015). Is it the ‘Alpha’ or the ‘Numeric’: Consumers’ evaluation of letter versus number changes in alphanumeric brand names. Journal of Brand Management, 22(6), 515–533. https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2015.28
Klink, R. R., & Athaide, G. A. (2012). Creating brand personality with brand names. Marketing Letters, 23(1), 109–117. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-011-9140-7
Klink, R. R., & Wu, L. (2014). The role of position, type, and combination of sound symbolism imbeds in brand names. Marketing Letters, 25(1), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-013-9236-3
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh. University of Chicago Press.
Landau, M. J., Brian, P. M., & Lucas, A. K. (2010). A metaphor-enriched social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 136(6), 1045–1067. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020970
Lee, S., & Pillai, R. G. (2013). More to form than meets the eye? The impact of form and functional design on attitude towards new products. Journal of Managerial Issues, 25, 345–359.
Markman, A. B., & Medin, D. L. (1995). Similarity and alignment in choice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 63(2), 117–130. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1995.1067
Ornstein, R. E. (1969). On the Experience of Time. Penguin Books.
Peterson, H. L. (1975). How do you know it's old? A practical handbook on the detection of fakes for the antique collector and curator. Scribner Collection.
Petty, R. E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Schumann, D. (1983). Central and peripheral routes to advertising effectiveness: The moderating role of involvement. Journal of Consumer Research, 10(2), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1086/208954
Radford, S. K., & Bloch, P. H. (2011). Linking innovation to design: Consumer responses to visual product newness. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 28(S1), 208–220. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5885.2011.00871.x
Selinger, M., Dahl, D. W., & Moreau, C. P. (2006). “Is this product really new?” A study on the effect of category information and certainty on newness evaluations of new-to-market products. Advances in Consumer Research, 33(1), 323–324.
Torralbo, A., Santiago, J., & Lupianez, J. (2006). Flexible conceptual projection of time onto spatial frames of reference. Cognitive Science, 30(4), 745–757. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_67
Tourangeau, R., & Sternberg, R. J. (1982). Understanding and appreciating metaphors. Cognition, 11(3), 203–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(82)90016-6
Truong, Y., Klink, R. R., Fort-Rioche, L., & Athaide, G. A. (2013). Consumer response to product form in technology-based industries. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(4), 867–876. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12128
Ulrich, R., & Maienborn, C. (2010). Left–right coding of past and future in language: The mental timeline during sentence processing. Cognition, 117(2), 126–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.001
Weger, U. W., & Pratt, J. (2008). Time flies like an arrow: Space–time compatibility effects suggest the use of a mental timeline. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(2), 426–430. https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.2.426
Zhao, M., Hoeffler, S., & Dahl, D. W. (2012). Imagination difficulty and new product evaluation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29(S1), 76–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5885.2012.00951.x
Zwaan, R. A., & Yaxley, R. H. (2003). Spatial iconicity affects semantic relatedness judgments. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(4), 954–958.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge financial support by way of grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Funding
This work was supported by the [National Natural Science Foundation of China] under Grant [number 71702177, 71532011].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Wenting Feng, LiJia Wang and Tao Wang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Wenting Feng and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of Interest
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Ethics Approval
Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of Research Center for Psychological and Health Sciences, China University of Geosciences.
Consent to Participate
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Consent for Publication
Not applicable.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Feng, W., Wang, L. & Wang, T. Love the new and loathe the old: The influence of alphabetic order in a brand series on consumers’ preferences. Curr Psychol 42, 11646–11660 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02479-9
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02479-9