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INTRODUCTION
With Apple's introduction of the original iMac in 1998, the company kicked off a revolution in brand nomenclature. Although the 'i' prefix was intended by Apple to mean many things - 'Internet, individual, instruct, inform, inspire' ('The First iMac Introduction', 1998) - an increasingly self-centric culture (Twenge and Campbell, 2009) elevated one meaning above all - individual. In short, 'i' became quickly understood, as 'I' and a slew of brand names that co-opt oneself - combining the first-person pronouns I and my with product relevant root words - have been launched in the intervening 13 years. They run the gamut of cultural zeitgeists like MySpace to more niche brands such as T-Mobile's myTouch and also Sega's iDog. Yet, despite the cultural prevalence of this brand nomenclature, little is known about if, how or under what circumstances it influences brand name preference.
It is well established that linking consumption stimuli to consumers' self-concepts produces favorable consumer responses. Going back more than two decades, studies showed that explicitly asking consumers to relate advertising messages to their own experiences enhanced consumer attitudes toward and purchase intentions of brands (Shavitt and Brock, 1986). Consumers also tend to think more highly of things when they personally own them compared with when they belong to others, as evidenced by the phenomenon of mere ownership (Beggan, 1992). Other work has shown similar invocations of the self and favorable consumer responses via advertising images (Debevec and Romeo, 1992), perceived match between consumer and brand personality (Aaker, 1999), and even subconscious cues such as the appearance of a consumer's own name letter in that of a brand name (Brendl et al , 2005). The purpose of this research is to investigate whether the pronouns I and my could be a similar conduit for evoking the self in brand name judgments and to explore the conditions under which they might improve brand name preference. In addition, we seek to identify the psychological process from pronoun to brand name preference.
In this article, we use the theoretical bases of subjective ownership (Carmon et al, 2003) and narrative self-referencing (Escalas, 2007) to explain and predict consumer responses to brand names that use the first-person pronouns I and my . Prior work on subjective ownership has...