http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Diet/story?id=3452600&page=1
The study had 63 children, aged 3 to 5 years old, tasting five pairs of identical foods and beverages -- one in McDonald's wrapping and the other in unbranded packaging. The researchers then asked them a simple question: "Which one tastes better?"An overwhelming number of the children said the food in the McDonald's wrapping was tastier. Oddly enough, this applied even to vegetables and milk. Sixty-one percent of the children in the study preferred the taste of carrots and 54 percent preferred the taste of milk if they were reminded by the packaging that it came from McDonald's. Study author Dr. Thomas Robinson, professor of paediatrics and medicine at Stanford University, said he was somewhat surprised by the findings. "I expected we would find some effects of branding in this age group, but not this strong, especially for the carrots and milk," he said.
I found this study really interesting but quite disturbing at the same time - these children have been brain washed to believe that McDonalds is something that tastes better than everything else. This could be really harmful to children of this age as they are very susceptible to manipulation and it shows possibly a reason why child obesity is so high in our country and in America.
INFLUENCES OF BRAND NAME AND PACKAGING ON PERCEIVED QUALITY
Benny Rigaux-Bricmont, Universite Laval
ABSTRACT -
Using an experimental design on the Belgian coffee market, the present research investigates the combined effects of brand names and brand packaging on the consumers' perceptions of quality. As evidenced by the empirical results, both extrinsic cues do influence the consumers' quality evaluation, not only separately but also interactively. Managerial and consumer research implications are briefly described.
CONCLUSION -
As evidenced by the present study, both brand names and brand packaging do influence the consumers' quality evaluations. These are certainly not the only extrinsic cues influencing the perception of coffee quality. For example, in a study conducted in Michigan, Roberts and Taylor (1975) investigated with mixed results the effects of the visual cue of granule size on ratings of various coffee types. But here, only the first two cues were suspected to be potential troublemakers for the client firm.
In a managerial perspective, the finding that-brand and packaging images help the consumer in differentiating the brands, accentuates the importance of the various firms' marketing efforts, and more particularly, their interdependence. Furthermore, such an experiment determines the relative performance of the major competitors' brand image and packaging on the market. The fact that, in this case, the performance is not directly associated with the market shares of two brands, can be explained by the high level of satisfaction they both develop. In a situation of equivalent perceived quality, the "elder" firm benefits from the consumer "inertia". Extended promotional sales are probably a potential strategy for switching brand loyalty, especially for a product in the maturity phase of its cycle. Finally, this kind of analysis is useful for evaluating either the effectiveness of the advertising programs, or the adequacy of the existing forms of packaging.
In a consumer research perspective, additional results on multiple cue effects are necessary for a better understanding of the chunking phenomenon. With the growing interest in information acquisition, the chunking process appears to be a promising avenue. By selecting a limited amount of informational cues (intrinsic and extrinsic), the consumer could infer a configuration which would suffice for making his decision. Such a conceptualisation corresponds to Sam Becker's "mosaic" model of human communication (1968) where numerous message bits are organised into a unitary whole which is never "final". Moving within the informational environment, the consumer is constantly adding, deleting, strengthening, selecting, and substituting message bits comprising the mosaic (Fisher 1978). How many cues (relatively meaningless isolated pieces in the mosaic) does an "expert" consumer need to form an organised whole? The identification of those "anchor" cues could be crucial for advances in consumer information processing.
This study by Benny Rigaux Bricmont proves that a brand name and packaging does have an effect on the perceived value or quality of a product. Participants showed a significant result to the perception of the taste of the coffee when shown the packaged and branded samples rather than the samples that were in a plain white bag. This is supported by the results that I got - when people saw the packaging they immediately related a price or quality to it. Yet in the blind taste test they struggled to see which would be better quality from the taste alone and the results showed this.
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