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An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this issue.
1. Introduction
The usage of pronouns and their homonyms in brand names dates back to at least 1945, with the establishment of U-Haul as a one-way trailer rental service for do-it-yourself movers during the post-World War II sprawl in the USA (U-Haul, 2013). Who did the hauling? You , the consumer. Pronoun brand nomenclature - designed to evoke the consumer's self-concept - has become particularly trendy in recent years, revitalized by Apple's introduction of the iMac in 1998 and following through to social media phenomena like MySpace and YouTube among many others. Recent research has articulated when and how I and my brand names produce favorable consumer responses (Wiebenga and Fennis, 2012; Kachersky and Palermo, 2013), yet the influence of the archetypal you on brand name evaluations remains unexplored. This research aims to address that gap.
Whether stemming from enhanced involvement or a general affinity for similarity, consumers tend to prefer stimuli when considered through the lens of their own self-concepts. Consumers who relate advertising messages to their own experiences exhibit enhanced brand attitudes and purchase intentions (Shavitt and Brock, 1986). Advertising images (Debevec and Romeo, 1992) and brand personalities (Aaker, 1999) that reflect the consumer also tend to elicit more favorable consumer evaluations, and consumers more favorably evaluate objects that they personally own compared with evaluations of the same objects when they belong to others (Beggan, 1992). Building on these works, researchers have found that consumers prefer brand names that include the pronouns I and my because of the words' ability to invoke consumers' self-concepts (Wiebenga and Fennis, 2012; Kachersky and Palermo, 2013) The objective of the present work is to probe if and under what circumstances the common brand pronoun you elicits similarly favorable responses.
We draw on extant research on pronoun usage as well as positioning fit to describe consumer responses to brand names that include the pronoun you compared with the pronoun I . The pronoun you is the second-person correspondent to the pronoun I . Kachersky and Palermo (2013) showed that the use of I in a brand name caused consumers to imagine themselves actively using the product, which in turn increased...