Associate Professor Zachary Estes to visit Department of Marketing

Configuring brand sets: Spatial arrangement of brand elements affects attitudes and memory

Co-Authors: Duncan Guest (Nottingham Trent), Michael Gibbert (Lugano), and David Mazursky (Hebrew University)

Prior research has isolated many important factors influencing consumers’ evaluation and memory of brand names and logos. However, effective branding often entails the coordination of multiple brand elements, and little is currently known about how brand elements may interact. The present research examines attitudes toward and memory of multi-element brand sets, focusing specifically on the spatial arrangement of brand names, slogans, and logos. Many brand names have upward or downward associations (e.g., Boots pharmacy, Sun microsystems, Dirt Devil, Samsung Galaxy), and words with spatial associations are also common in slogans (e.g., “Like a rock”, “King of beers”, “Head for the mountains”).

Spatial associations of words can have two opposing effects on judgment: Spatial associations can evoke an iconicity effect, whereby judgments are facilitated when the word appears in its associated location, or they can evoke an orienting effect, whereby judgments are facilitated when an object appears in the word’s associated location. We conducted a series of experiments identifying the conditions under which iconicity and orienting effects influence attitudes, preferences, and memory for brand elements, and how they do so. Thus, this research advances our theoretical understanding of how and why spatial associations of brand elements influence consumer attitudes and memory. More generally, this research is also among the first to demonstrate how brand elements can be coordinated to enhance consumer perceptions and attitudes.

Zachary Estes (PhD in Psychology, Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Marketing at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. He has served as Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Science, and has served on the editorial boards of other journals and on the program committees of academic organizations in both psychology and marketing. His theoretical and applied research on cognition, emotion, and consumer behavior has been awarded funding by international granting agencies, and has been published in psychology and marketing journals including Cognitive Psychology, Emotion, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Psychological Science, and Psychology & Marketing. He is also the proud winner of teaching awards at Bocconi and at the University of Warwick (UK).