Psychology and Marketing, Vol. 31(1): 4853 (January 2014) View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.

com/journal/march 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20674

A Name You Can Trust? Personification Effects Are Influenced by Beliefs About Company Values
Kendall J. Eskine and William H. Locander Loyola University New Orleans

Background
Importance of Brand names
Represents quality, characteristic and relationship

Brands personality plays a significant role in the development of this relationship (Aaker et al 1997)
The set of human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker 1997) Effects on consumers beliefs about brands and actual products (Azoulay et al 2003) Personification (i.e., ascribing human traits to inanimate objects) can alter consumers perceptions about products in various ways (Delbare et al 2011)

Research Gap
Research shows positive relationship between consumer appraisals and personified products Research Gap
How individuals general views about companies alter personification effects?

Present Research
Empirical investigation of effects of human named and non human named brand names on brand trust

Literature review
Personifiation, Anthropocentrism, and Basic Motivations
Personification effects rooted in deeper cognitive bias (Delbaere et al 2011) Litereture indicates that personifying products leads consumers to form positive judgments about products, which is a result of anthro-pomorphic cognitive biases to view most aspects of the world in human-like ways. In line with this idea is the nding that personication increases consumers trust in products (Fournier, 1998).

Literature Review
Brand Trust
(Sung & Kim, 2010), trust has been conceptualized a variety of ways, including loyalty (Berry, 1983), service quality (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1985), relationship quality (Dwyer, Schurr, & Oh, 1987), and cooperation (Anderson & Narus, 1990), among others the willingness of the average consumer to rely on the ability of the brand to perform its stated function (Chaudhuri et al) Growing trend of mistrust (lantieri et al 2009)

Present Research
Mistrust can create negative concepts about personified products Studies 1a and 1b investigated the extent to which branding products with human (vs. nonhuman) names affected brand trust Participants beliefs about company were also studied to know about their moderating effect on trust judgements (Study 2)

Hypothesis
Participants would trust nonhuman-named products more than human-named products, but only for those who mistrust company values more generally.

Study 1a
Assessed consumer trust judgments Materials and Procedures
Sample size 89 undergraduates
52 females and 32 males Mean age 19.26