We start with some interesting articles:

Cleopatra's cosmetics and Hammurabi's Heineken

New study finds that branding is older than previously thought

From at least Bass Ale’s red triangle—advertised as “the first registered trademark”—commodity brands have exerted a powerful hold over modern Western society. Marketers and critics alike have assumed that branding began in the West with the Industrial Revolution. But a pioneering new study in the February 2008 issue of Current Anthropology finds that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism, and indeed modern Western society.

In “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” author David Wengrow challenges the widespread assumption that branding did not become an important force in social and economic life until the Industrial Revolution. Wengrow presents compelling evidence that labels on ancient containers, which have long been assumed to be simple identifiers, as well as practices surrounding the production and distribution of commodities, actually functioned as branding strategies. Furthermore, these strategies have deep cultural origins and cognitive foundations, beginning in the civilizations of Egypt and Iraq thousands of years ago.

Branding became necessary when large-scale economies started mass-producing commodities such as alcoholic drinks, cosmetics and textiles. Ancient societies not only imposed strict forms of quality control over these commodities, but as today they needed to convey value to the consumer. Wengrow finds that commodities in any complex, large society needs to pass through a "nexus of authenticity.” Through history, these have taken the form of “the bodies of the ancestral dead, the gods, heads of state, secular business gurus, media celebrities, or that core fetish of post-modernity, the body of the sovereign consumer citizen in the act of self-fashioning.” Although capitalism and branding find in each other a perfect complement, they have distinct origins. Wengrow shows that branding has for millennia filled a deep-seated need for us humans to find value in the goods that we consume.

Sure to be provocative, “Prehistories of Commodity Branding” is necessary reading for a wide range of people, from those interested in the workings of ancient societies to anyone who is interested in understanding how marketing has developed into a powerful force in our lives.

David Wengrow is Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics. For more information, please see our Web site: www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA.

Wengrow, David “Prehistories of Commodity Branding” Current Anthropology 49:1 .

 

Branding matters -- even when searching

Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off, according to a Penn State study.

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

The queries included “camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music.”

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

“Given that there was no difference in the results, all of the search engines should have had the exact same score,” said Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. “Some emotional branding is having an effect here.” Jansen and co-author, Mimi Zhang, an IST graduate student, detailed the study in a paper, “The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results,” at the recent Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, Calif.

The researchers were motivated to understand why Web users gravitate toward a handful of search engines when there are about 4,000 search engines that have similar technologies and similar interfaces. The performance -- defined as the ratio of relevant documents to the total number returned at some point in the results listing -- of those search engines also is practically the same.

To determine each engine's “performance,” participants rated the returned results on a three-point scale: very relevant, somewhat relevant, and not relevant. After averaging the scores, the researcher determined an average -- about 36 percent of all results were judged relevant to the query.

The researchers then looked at each engine’s “score” to determine whether it fell above or below the average.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

Given that many of the participants said they used Google to search, Jansen said he was surprised that Yahoo! came out on top. Its total scores were 15 percent above the average for the four queries while Google’s total scores were just 0.7 percent above the average. Future research will consider whether participants “carried over” satisfaction with other products when ranking search engines, Jansen said.

AI2RS, the search engine created in-house with no brand-name recognition, fared the worst. The researchers calculated its average precision rating as 10 percent below the average although AI2RS had the highest score when the query was “laser removal.”

The study ties branding not just to product identification but also to product performance, Jansen said.

 

Choosing One's Favorite Brands An FMRI Study On Preference-Based Decision Making

Which one do you prefer, Pepsi or Coca-Cola? VAIO or Powerbook? Super Dry or Black Label (Japanese beers)? Asians or Super Mild (shampoos sold in Japan)? Consumers' preferences for commodity brands depend on cultural backgrounds, professions, sex, age and purchasing powers. Typically, when an individual prefers a particular brand, he/she cares less about other brands in the same category. Thus, the preference for a brand may be related to a consumer's positive emotional or experiential association with the brand, in contrast to his/her neutralism towards other brands. In a study using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) targeting Japanese female college students, a relatively uniform population, neural mechanisms underlying their commodity preferences was investigated. A pre-scan screen revealed that among 560 brands chosen from ~100 categories, most of students preferred the same brand and were neutral to the remaining brands in each of 80 categories. We then prepared 80 preferred-neutral brand pairs and asked the students to either choose their preferred brand or the one judged visually striking from the pair while their brains were scanned. The comparison between these two decision-making processes revealed elevated activity in a brain network known to be involved in modifying decision-making with positive emotions, evaluation of individual brands and memory processes, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, midbrain and parahippocampal gyrus. A similar brain network was also activated when these students performed the same two tasks on positive-neutral picture pairs. These results may lead to a better understanding of neural mechanisms underlying the consumer psychology as how consumers make decisions in choosing certain commodities over others.

Organization for Human Brain Mapping
L&L Management 5841 Cedar Lake Rd. Ste. 108
Minneapolis, MN 55416
United States
http://www.humanbrainmapping.org

 

Foods Taste Better With McDonald's Logo, Kids Say

Study suggests branding has powerful effect on preschoolers' diet.

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

(SOURCES: David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Prevention Research Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.; Walter Riker, spokesman, McDonald's Corporation, Oak Brook, Ill; Aug. 6, 2007, news release, Stanord University; August 2007, Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine)

MONDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Most 3- and 5-year-olds who taste-tested a variety of foods said they preferred the ones in the McDonald's wrapper -- even though the foods were exactly the same, a new study finds.

The study suggests that, like adults, young children are highly influenced by branding, experts say.

"This study demonstrates simply and elegantly that advertising literally brainwashes young children into a baseless preference for certain food products," said Dr. David Katz, the director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.

"Children, it seems, literally do judge a food by its cover. And they prefer the cover they know," said Katz, who was not involved in the research.

The study was led by Dr. Thomas Robinson, the director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children's Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, in Stanford, Calif. His team had 63 children, ages 3 and 5, sample five foods: chicken nuggets, a hamburger, french fries, baby carrots and milk.

The chicken nuggets, hamburger and french fries were all from McDonald's; the carrots and milk were from a grocery store.

Each sample was divided into two portions: one wrapped in a McDonald's wrapper or placed in a McDonald's bag and the other in a wrapper without the McDonald's logo.

After taste-testing, the children more often said the chicken nuggets, fries, carrots and milk wrapped in the McDonald's logo tasted better, even though the foods were exactly the same.

"Kids don't just ask for food from McDonald's," Robinson said in a prepared statement. "They actually believe that the chicken nugget they think is from McDonald's tastes better than an identical, unbranded nugget."

Further research revealed that one-third of the children ate at McDonald's more than once a week, and more than three-quarters had McDonald's toys at home. In addition, the children in the study had an average of 2.4 televisions in their homes. More than half the kids had a TV in their bedrooms.

"We found that kids with more TVs in their homes and those who eat at McDonald's more frequently were even more likely to prefer the food in the McDonald's wrapper," Robinson said. "This is a company that knows what they're doing. Nobody else spends as much to advertise their fast-food products to children." It is estimated that McDonald's spend more than $1 billion dollars per year on U.S. advertising.

"It's really an unfair marketplace out there for young children," Robinson said. "It's very clear they cannot understand the persuasive nature of advertising."

The report is in the August issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

McDonald's responded by saying that it is dealing with the problem.

"This is an important subject, and McDonald's has been actively addressing it for quite some time," said McDonald's spokesman Walt Riker. "In fact, McDonald's is only advertising Happy Meals with white meat McNuggets, fresh apple slices and low-fat milk, a right-sized meal of only 375 calories," he said.

"The fact is, parents make the decisions for their children, and our research confirms that we've earned their trust as a responsible marketer based on decades of delivering the safest food, the highest quality toys and the kind of choice and variety today's families are looking for," Riker said.

Last December, McDonald's and nine other food companies announced the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. The company's agreed to devote at least half their advertising to promoting healthier choices for children.

But many experts remain unimpressed.

"There is general consensus among those of us in public health that the marketing of foods of poor nutritional quality to children should be regulated, if not abolished," Katz said.

Children in the United Sates are already subject to epidemic obesity and rising rates of what used to be adult onset diabetes, Katz said. Even greater threats, such as heart disease in adolescence, could become common should current trends persist, he added.

"We have a clear and compelling mandate to eliminate any influence we find that is propagating current trends," Katz said. "The branding of fast foods and junk foods into the minds of young children is one of those influences. When product familiarity is breeding ill health, it is time to put a stop to it."

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can tell you more about childhood obesity

 

 

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