Branding with the in-out effect: the impact of consonantal articulation on brand evaluation

Abstract

Recent research has shown that mouth movements, produced even during silent reading, can affect stimulus evaluation. Words featuring systematic wanderings of consonantal stricture spots ranging from the front to the rear of the mouth (inward) are preferred to words with wanderings in the opposite direction (outward). In four experiments, the authors extended this in–out effect from a basic laboratory setting to a more ecologically relevant domain and examined the boundary conditions of possible applications to marketing. In this research, the inward/outward words presented were embedded in common brand imagery such as labels, logos, and product packages. Either with plain graphic information or with more visually informative packaging, inward names were always preferred (all p-values < 0.001). These results indicate that concurrent information that competitively feeds into the preference judgment did not have diagnostic value when compared to the articulation direction. Such prevalence of the effect even when embedded in more complex stimulus emphasizes the relevance of investigating oral kinematics effects and the need to further research other sensorimotor phenomena in consumer behavior.