Companies increasingly borrow the nicknames their customers use, from Bloomingdale’s opening a “Bloomie’s” store to Christian Louboutin calling its shoes “Loubi.” A new study finds the tactic tends to backfire: when a brand calls itself by its street name, people see it as less powerful and are less keen to buy.
The research is by Zhe Zhang of the Ivey Business School at Western University, Ning Ye of Stockton University and Matthew Thomson of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was published online in the Journal of Marketing on September 15, 2024. The authors call it the first empirical test of “nickname branding.”
A nickname as a show of submission
The authors draw on speech act theory, which looks at what words do as well as what they say. Their argument is that when a firm drops its formal name for the one consumers coined, it signals submission to those consumers, hands them some power and so weakens the brand’s own image of strength.
To test this, they combined real-world data, field tests and preregistered experiments with American participants.
From tweets to watch prices
On Chevrolet’s Twitter account, tweets that used “Chevy” drew an average of 143 likes, against 422 for tweets using only the formal name, and were shared far less. In a Facebook A/B test reaching 38,102 users, an ad for “Tarzhay” had a click-through rate of 0.03%, compared with 0.09% for the identical “Target” ad. A TikTok test of “Big Brown” against “UPS” showed a smaller, marginal gap.
In a simulated Christian Louboutin rental site, 58.8% of 190 women chose a pair of shoes labelled with the formal name, but only 21.5% chose the same pair when it was labelled “Loubi.” Ads for “Big Blue” produced lower purchase intent than ads for IBM. Both “Starbies” and “Fourbucks” lowered purchase intent for Starbucks, and people were willing to pay about $3.48 for a coffee under either nickname, against $3.85 under the real name.
Price perceptions moved the most. Participants estimated a pair of watches shown in an ad at $16,745 when it said Rolex, but $11,862 when it said Rollie. In a study of 298 people, the same BMW was valued $6,556 lower when it was called Beemer.
Power, not closeness, is the culprit
Studies with Walmart (“WallyWorld”) and Rolex showed that nicknames lowered ratings of brand power, and that this drop explained the fall in purchase intent. The BMW study ruled out two rival explanations: nickname use did not change people’s sense of a relationship with the brand, or how familiar it felt. The effect also did not depend on whether people were regular Walmart or Starbucks customers.
The damage was not universal. For a fictitious law firm, a brand built on competence, a nickname cut purchase intent from 4.97 to 4.28, but it made no significant difference for a fictitious charity, a brand built on warmth. And in a Starbucks study with about 800 participants, a nickname hurt in a transactional message but not in a communal one.
The authors list open questions, such as whether a nickname spoken by an employee or influencer, or used in an apology after a product failure, might work better. They also wonder about the rare nickname given by a third party, like the champagne Bollinger’s “Bolly,” attributed to the future King Edward VII in 1885.
Study Details:
- Title: BMW Is Powerful, Beemer Is Not: Nickname Branding Impairs Brand Performance
- Authors: Zhe Zhang, Ning Ye, Matthew Thomson
- Journal: Journal of Marketing
- Publication Date: September 15, 2024
- DOI: 10.1177/00222429241266586