Deprivation of Control and the Phonetic Appeal of Brand Names

People must often respond to control threats of different nature in their daily lives: mundane (e.g., stockout) or tragic (e.g., natural disaster), negative (e.g., flight delay) or positive (e.g., early delivery). Research documents a wide range of responses that people can implement to compensate for low control states, from overestimating one’s ability to control random events (Langer 1975) to seeking structure (Cutright 2012). In this research, we uncover a compensatory strategy to restore control that involves the phonetic appeal of certain brand names. Specifically, we investigate consumers’ attraction for brand names containing plosive consonants (i.e., “b”, “d”, “g”, “k”, “p”, and “t”) in the context of perceived control loss. Past research suggests that executing articulatory movements in the mouth to produce sounds can bear sensory information (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988; Topolinski et al., 2015; 2017). Here, we propose that plosives entail a physical action that reflects one’s readiness for action because of the abrupt popping sound made by a stoppage of air in the mouth followed by a sudden explosive release. Based on past research suggesting that individuals exert greater effort immediately following a loss of control as a way of regaining control (Greenaway et al., 2015a), we hypothesize that perceived control loss increases the appeal of plosive-based brand names because plosives elicit the feeling of doing something.