From Chubby Hubby ice cream to Trailer Park red nail polish, marketers using ambiguous or surprising descriptions for new flavors and colors are likely to win sales by making consumers go through the effort of understanding an off-beat name, according to recent Wharton research.
In a paper titled, "Shades of Meaning: The Effect of Color and Flavor Names on Consumer Choice" -- published in the current issue of the Journal of Consumer Research -- Wharton marketing professor Barbara E. Kahn and Elizabeth G. Miller, a marketing professor at Boston College, found that consumers react positively to imaginative names even if they are not particularly descriptive. The research may have strong implications for Internet marketers whose customers cannot see a product first-hand and tend to rely more on written descriptions when making purchases, says Kahn.
In studies of jellybeans and colored sweaters, the researchers found an overall positive reaction to names that gave little information about what a flavor or product color was really like, such as Millennium orange or Snuggly white. "People jumped to the conclusion that the marketer must be telling this information for some reason," says Kahn. "They said, 'Even though I don't understand the reason, it has to be something good because marketers wouldn't tell me something that isn't good.' When they stopped and spent time on the name the assumption was that it was positive."
Kahn was drawn to a study of unusual product names when she began to notice nail polish being sold under color names -- such as Gunpowder -- that gave no information about what the polish would actually look like. Another example: the line of Gatorade Frost flavors that are sold with hard-to-imagine flavor names such as Glacier Freeze, Riptide Rush and Cascade Crash. Perhaps the ultimate in ambiguity, says Kahn, has been achieved by Crayola which uses names such as Razzmatazz and Tropical Rain Forest to describe crayons, which are nothing else if not a color.
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