What do you call it?

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My first set of wheels was a bright red Fiat Punto named Holly Golightly, in homage to my favourite film at the age of 18. As humans, the desire to anthropomorphise inanimate objects is a long-enduring trait it seems – and it’s not just our cars; we assign nicknames to everything, from boats to laptops to bikes.

In recent years, brands toying with personalisation have started to get in on the name game, with companies encouraging consumers to come up
with a name for their products. Toyota’s 2015 ‘Mas Que Un Auto’ campaign, for instance, gave Toyota owners free custom nameplates for their cars, while some banks allow customers to set up nicknames for their accounts.

But does naming something increase our affinity for it? Could giving a product a name even make us more likely to buy it? And do these effects extend to naming seemingly mundane, everyday objects?

The phenomenon is the subject of a research paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, which looks at how the act of naming a product can improve consumer evaluations and even increase purchase intentions – in other words, people place more value on objects they have named.

Previous research had found that naming something can lead to feelings of psychological ownership – the view that you own something even if you are not the legal owner.

Perceived ownership can also boost consumer evaluations of an object. Research in 2009 from Joann Peck and Suzanne Shu, for instance, found that merely touching something results in an increase in perceived ownership – and subsequently positively influences people’s opinions of the object.

Therefore, the researchers hypothesised that psychological ownership would play a mediating role – in other words, if you give something a name, your feelings of ownership increase, and in turn you place a higher value on said object.

Jennifer Stoner, assistant professor of marketing at the University of North Dakota, first became interested in the naming issue when she gave her new mixer a nickname. “I started to look in academic literature to better understand anything I could about naming of products and was surprised to find there wasn’t any research on it,” she says. “Around the same time, I started to see that companies were doing things to encourage consumers to name their products.”

The research also sought to find out whether names given by the consumer themselves would have more of an impact than pre-assigned names, and whether assigned names that describe a product (such as ‘Muggy’ for a mug) would perform better than names that bear no relation (for example, a mug named ‘Bob’).

For the first study, 48 participants were each given a stress ball and told to squeeze it at least once a day, with some of the participants asked to give the ball a name and describe why they chose it.

In a follow-up session four weeks later, participants were asked how much money it would take for them to sell the ball – testing their ‘willingness to accept’. The study found that those who had given their stress balls a name valued them more than the control participants who hadn’t; in fact, they would charge over a dollar more to part with it.

In a second experiment, 200 participants were shown a picture of a blue stapler, with some people asked to give it a name. In two other assigned-name groups, participants were informed the stapler’s name was either ‘Blue’ (descriptive) or ‘Steve’ (non-descriptive), while another group of participants (the control) did not see any name.

People who named the stapler themselves were more likely to want to buy it and reported higher levels of psychological ownership, according to the study.

Because naming an object is something that usually happens spontaneously, the researchers faced the challenge of trying to capture that phenomenon within a controlled study. “We were originally worried that if the participants were told to name a product as opposed to doing it spontaneously that we wouldn’t find any effects,” explains Stoner. “It’s really exciting and promising that we did.”

The researchers also conducted a third study where participants were given either a white mug or a blue stapler and asked to rate the object based on a name they had chosen themselves, a descriptive name (‘Muggy’ or ‘Blue’), and a non-descriptive name (‘Bob’ for the mug and ‘Steve’ for the stapler). They were asked how likely they would be to buy the product and assessed on their attitudes towards the object (how much they liked the object on a scale of one to seven).

Objects that people had named themselves were looked on more favourably and elicited higher purchase intentions than those with both descriptive and non-descriptive names, while descriptive names performed better on both measures than those with non-descriptive names.

The researchers chose stress balls, staplers and mugs because of their everyday mundane nature – they were unlikely to elicit strong polarising reactions from the participants or connect with some people more than others (in the way that, for example, a musical instrument might for some people who play).

“For me, the most interesting finding is that effect persists over time and has an impact on how people value their products,” says Stoner. Going back to the first study, she says: “The participants who had named the stress ball would charge $1.40 more for it (which is quite a lot for a basic stress ball).”

Stoner wants to do more research on the reasons behind spontaneous naming of products, such as how people arrive at the names they choose, and whether any other factors – brand, product type or distinctiveness – impact the effectiveness of naming a product. “I think it would be interesting to see how the relationship with the product changes over time if it has a name (do you take better care of it, keep it longer, feel more attached to it, and so on),” she adds.

In her view, more brands should be encouraging consumers to name their products. “Brands are trying to make their products more customisable by having them in different colours or with different features; however, encouraging customers to give their product a name can be a quick and cost-effective means to implement customisation that has many of the benefits of more expensive methods.”

‘The Name Game: How Naming Products Increases Psychological Ownership and Subsequent Consumer Evaluations’ by
Jennifer Stoner, Barbara Loken and Ashley Stadler Blank, Volume 28, Issue 1, Journal of Consumer Psychology.

This article was first published in Issue 24 of Impact.