Positive Brand Inferences from Processing Disfluency

Despite the widespread use of acronyms in branding (e.g., IKEA, WWF), little is known in terms of how consumers perceive them. According to research on processing fluency, easy-to-pronounce acronyms should render more positive evaluations of a brand than difficult-to-pronounce acronyms. This is because the ease of processing fluent information creates positive affect which is often misattributed to the target (Reber, Winkielman, and Schwarz 1998). In the present research, we argue that difficult-to-pronounce acronyms can be evaluated favorably with respect to attributes that are associated with social distance. Our prediction is based on research that shows that disfluent stimuli are associated with physical distance and abstract construal (Alter and Oppenheimer 2008; Förster 2009). In a brand name context, we argue that the difficulty of processing a brand name elicits the impression that a brand is “distant” from the consumer. In turn, the brand is positively evaluated with respect to attributes that are representative of distant relations. This explanation is in keeping with research that suggests when people encounter information that is consistent with an existing mental representation, they are likely to “feel right” about the information, which subsequently heightens the evaluations of target information (e.g., Kim, Rao, and Lee 2009; Higgins et al. 2003; Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman 2004). Attributes that are associated with social closeness, on the other hand, are experienced as “unfit” with the distant representation of the brand, and therefore, are expected to be less positively evaluated compared to fluent brands.