Articulation Patterns in Names: A Hidden Route to Consumer Preference

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Articulation Patterns in Names: A Hidden Route

to Consumer Preference

SASCHA TOPOLINSKI

ABSTRACT This article highlights recent approaches exploring a novel route to consumer preferences, motoric ar-ticulation patterns of names that invoke approach and avoidance tendencies and thereby trigger positive consumer attitudes toward the objects and products that bear such names. Speciﬁcally, names are construed for which the artic-ulations spots of the consonants move either from the front to the back of the mouth (inward, such as BAKO) or from the back to the front of the mouth (outward, such as KABO). In several lines of studies, participants express higher favorability of inward over outward words. Moreover, persons and companies with inward names are liked more than persons with outward names. Also, participants report higher product liking, purchase intentions, and higher willing-ness to pay for products with inward names over outward names. When food is labeled in such a way, participants report higher palatability of and even consume more of food bearing inward names compared to outward names.

H

ow to name a product? There are many ways to im-prove consumers’ attitudes toward your product, brand, or company by choosing a name that elicits positive associations (e.g., Rao and Monroe 1989; Brucks, Zeithaml, and Naylor 2000). You can do this by mere seman-tic associations, that is, by exploiting the meaning of words and fancily connect them to your product’s use or company’s aims. For instance, a knife could be called Superblade or Di-amond, and an insurance company could be called Welltrust. This strategy is probably too obvious and might elicit reac-tance in consumers, since they easily become aware that you want to inﬂuence them (e.g., Clee and Wicklund 1980). Then you might alter the originally meaningful words a little bit, so that only a resemblance to real words remains, maybe only in the sound of the word. The actually existing drug brand name Velcade©_{is a good example of this; it initially}

sounds positive, since it is a contraction and slight modi ﬁca-tion of the words“well,” “care,” and “aid.”

Yet there are even more subtle routes to consumers’ guts, for instance, the sound of the word. In the highly re-searched domain of sound symbolism, it is shown that peo-ple express higher favorability toward products when the sound of the product’s name match some perceptual fea-tures of the product (e.g., Fitch 1994; Klink 2000; Lowrey, Shrum, and Dubitsky 2003; Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala 2006; Kovic, Plunkett, and Westermann 2010; Shrum et al. 2012).

For example, Lowrey and Shrum (2007) used words that fea-tured either high-sounding front vowels, such as NILLEN or GIMMEL, bearing multimodal associations with perceptual features such as small, fast, or sharp; or low-pitch word with back vowels, such as NALLEN or GOMMEL, bearing associ-ations with features like large, slow, or dull. These high- and low-sounding words were labeled as brand names for prod-ucts that were associated either with high-pitch qualities (i.e., small, fast, sharp), namely, a knife or a convertible, or with low-pitch qualities (i.e., large, slow, dull), namely, a hammer or an SUV. Participants preferred the high-pitch names over the low-pitch names when these names denoted the lighter and sharper products (knife, convertible), but they showed a reserved preference pattern when the names denoted the heavier and slower products (hammer, SUV).

Besides such sound associations, other, actually com-pletely meaningless, features of words have been shown to affect consumer attitudes. One such feature is the mere pro-nounceability of words (Maheswaran, Mackie, and Chaiken 1992; Irmak, Vallen, and Robinson 2011; Topolinski, Erle, and Bakhtiari 2016). For instance, Alter and Oppenheimer (2006) showed in real-world data that shares with easy-to-pronounce ticker codes (such as KAR) sell better than shares with hard-to-pronounce ticker codes (such as KDR); and Song and Schwarz (2009) found that ostensible food addi-tives were rated as more harmful when they bore a relatively

Sascha Topolinski ([email protected]) is associate professor, Department of Psychology, Social and Economic Cognition, University of Cologne, Germany.

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hard-to-pronounce name (such as HNEGRIPITROM) than when they bore a relatively easy-to-pronounce name (such as MAGNALROXATE). Most recently, Silva and Topolinski (2017b) showed that sellers in eBay are rated as less trustwor-thy when their username was a long and hard-to-pronounce word than when it was a short and easy-to-pronounce word. These effects are due to negative feelings triggered by the dis-ﬂuency in reading hard-to-pronounce verbal material (Topo-linski and Strack 2009, 2010; Topo(Topo-linski 2012). Generalizing this to the economic domain, Zürn and Topolinski (2017) showed that players with easy compared to hard-to-pronounce names are trusted more in economic games.

Yet this conceptual article covers a novel way to increase spontaneous preferences toward names of persons, compa-nies, and products that goes beyond these already docu-mented phenomena. It shows that the mere “motoric pat-terns” in word articulation can induce positive feelings apart from meaning, sound associations, or readingﬂuency. To in-troduce this, weﬁrst have to take a look at the concept of “em-bodiment.”

EMBODIMENT: A MOTOR ROUTE TO PREFERENCES

In the last three decades, more and more evidence is accumu-lating in psychological and marketing research that shows that—independent of semantic meaning—our preferences and judgments are heavily inﬂuenced by modal, that is, sen-sory and motor components of our mental representations (for reviews, see Smith and Semin 2007; Barsalou 2008). Many demonstrations have shown a particular role of the motor domain. For instance, when we think about a mug, we do not only represent its meaning and abstract features (such as form and use) but also how we grasp a mug by its handle (Klatzky et al. 1989; Tucker and Ellis 1998). These motor components (i.e., inner mental representations of the ac-tions we usually do with the object) are elicited automatically when we even only passively watch an object; they covertly simulated in the brain. For instance, when we see a mug whose handle is pointed to the left (right) but have to re-spond to this sight by pressing a right ( left) key, we are slower than when both the handle and our key response point to the same sight (see the classical Simon [1969] ef-fect).

Such motor simulations of object-related actions can in-ﬂuence the way we judge those objects, even when they are irrelevant for the to-be-judged dimension. For instance, the above-mentioned matching or mismatching between a han-dle of an object and a required hand response elicits

spon-taneous positive or negative feelings (Cannon, Hayes, and Tipper 2010). This can be explained with a grasping simu-lation that runs automatically when we see a handle on the right or left side, and this hidden grasping simulation facil-itates the key press when it entails the same side than when it entails the opposite side (see the concept of motor ﬂu-ency: Topolinski 2010; Sparenberg et al. 2012; Leder, Bär, and Topolinski 2013; and the hedonic effects of ﬂuency per se: Winkielman and Cacioppo 2001; Winkielman et al. 2003; Topolinski et al. 2009; Topolinski and Reber 2010a, 2010b; Topolinski, Erle, and Reber 2015).

This inﬂuence of seemingly irrelevant motor features is also documented to affect consumer behavior (for recent re-views, see Krishna 2012; Krishna and Schwarz 2014). For the case of grasping simulations, Elder and Krishna (2016) showed that a cake was rated as more palatable when the fork to eat it was oriented toward the dominant hand of the participant. This again can be explained with an auto-matic simulation of eating the presented cake, which of course runs moreﬂuent when the fork is already at the sight on which we would grasp it with our dominant hand.

Not only theﬂuency of motor simulations but also the motivational and emotional associations connected to a cer-tain body movement can shape preferences. In one of the most classic effects in social psychology, moving a lever to-ward one’s body (exerting an approach movement) induces more preferable attitudes toward a simultaneously presented stimulus than moving a lever away from one’s body (exert-ing an avoidance movement; see, e.g., Cacioppo, Priester, and Berntson 1993; Centerbar and Clore 2006). This is because in everyday life we execute approach (avoidance) movements toward positive (negative) objects; thus, the mere movement itself is charged with affective meaning, even in the absence of positive or negative objects. As a conse-quence, executing this very body movement triggers the emo-tional valence associated with it, such as also activating the smiling muscle (without the actual intention to smile) en-hances positive feelings (Strack, Martin, and Stepper 1988; Rummer et al. 2014), sitting in an upright position makes you feel prouder (Stepper and Strack 1993), or executing up-ward movements boosts your self-esteem (Ostinelli, Luna, and Ringberg 2014).

Although the phenomenon of approach- and avoidance movements and their power to elicit according positive and negative feelings is well documented for the domain of hand and arm movements (e.g., Krieglmeyer et al. 2010; Eder, Elliot, and Harmon-Jones 2013), only most recently it has been shown that the same logic—movements toward

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the body are positive and movements away from it are nega-tive—can be applied to mouth movements, which is reviewed in the next section.

ORAL APPROACH AND AVOIDANCE

Articulation is a complex and highly orchestrated motor cir-cus that dictates a large number of very speciﬁc and well-deﬁned movements of the lips, the tongue, and the throat muscles (Ladefoged 2001; Titze 2008). Take a moment, ar-ticulate your name, and carefully observe the movements that take place in your mouth. Note how precise these move-ments have to be in order to produce the correct sounds, even for such easy names as BOB. To articulate BOB, you press both lips at each other, press air against them, then open them shortly only again to press them against each other. Now try to utter the name BOB not by pressing both lips against each other but by using your front teeth. If you press the upper front teeth against your lower lip, the name BOB becomes FOF (or VOV). Such a minute variation thus distorts the whole name. To give you other exercises, try to articulate the letter K with your lips, the letter L without moving you tongue, or the word MUM without closing your mouth; this all is futile.

What we see here is that very speciﬁc movements on narrowly deﬁned locations in the mouth are required to ar-ticulate each of the phonemes of human language (IPA 1999). This is particularly true for consonants, which re-quire local muscle contractions (while vowels only rere-quire coarse modulations of the volume of the whole mouth cav-ity). Interestingly, the spots at which consonants are pro-duced are dispersed over the sagittal, or front-to-back lane, of the mouth. Some consonants are produced at the front (like B and P with lips), some in the front middle ( like L and D with the tip of the tongue at the front soft palate), and others are produced in the back of the mouth ( like K, press-ing the rear back of your tongue against the rear hard pal-ate).

This distribution of the consonant articulation spots from the front to the back of the mouth allows us to con-strue words for which these articulation spots move either from the front to the back, or from the back to the front, of the mouth, respectively. For instance, for the name POL-LOCK, youﬁrst press your lips together (P), then tap with the front tongue against the front palate (L), and then eventually tap with the rear tongue back against the rear palate (K). Your articulation movements move inward. If we simply reverse the order of the consonants in the name

to KOLLOP, your articulation movements would move out-ward.

And here comes the twist: by sheer biomechanical means, such articulatory inward movements are quite similar to the movements we do when we ingest food, such as taking a sip from a beverage, or slurping and swallowing (Goyal and Mashimo 2006). In contrast, outward movements resemble the mouth movements we do when we expectorate things, such as while coughing or spitting. Since consumptive mouth movements are associated with positive experiences during eating, and expectorative mouth movements are associated with aversive experiences (Rozin and Fallon 1987; Rozin 1996, 1999), it can be predicted that oral inward and out-ward motor patterns function similar to manual approach and avoidance movements: oral inward patterns move to-ward the body and feel positive, and oral outto-ward patterns move away from the body and feel negative. That way, one could exploit such oral articulation patterns in creating names that move either inward or outward and thereby inﬂuence the speaker’s or reader’s spontaneous evaluation of that word, independent from the meaning of the word. Note that an overt utterance of a word is not even necessary since pre-vious research has shown that we already simulate articula-tion during silent reading, similar to the object-related ac-tion simulaac-tions described in the previous secac-tion (Stroop 1935; Topolinski and Strack 2009, 2010). This exactly was tested in several recent studies by different labs.

EFFECTS ON BASIC PREFERENCE

In aﬁrst set of studies, Topolinski et al. (2014) construed inward and outward words by assembling consonant se-quences that moved either from the front to the back of the mouth (e.g., MNK) or from the back to the front of the mouth (e.g., KNM) and then inserted random vowels in be-tween the consonants, for instance, MENIKA or KENIMA. The resulting stimulus pools were then scanned for words that accidentally contained meaningful syllables; these words were discarded. They then presented these words, one at a time, to participants and asked them how much they like the presented word. Across different pools of such stimuli and for both German and English native speakers they found that participants liked the inward words more than the out-ward words. This occurred irrespective of whether the words were simply labeled as fantasy words to be rated in positivity as possible stimulus words for ostensible future language studies or as actual person names whose likability was to be rated (Topolinski, Lindner, and Freudenberg 2014, exper-iments 1–6). When also including a baseline featuring words

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that showed random articulation patterns, they found such control words fell in between inward and outward words (ex-periment 5). Moreover, for person names this effect occurred also for both positively associated person (ostensible heroes in a computer game) and negatively associated persons (os-tensible villains in a computer game). This latterﬁnding is puzzling since one would rather expect a matching effect in the way that positive persons are associated more with in-ward names and negative persons are associated more with outward names. Later we will review such interactions be-tween the affective value of the denoted object and the in-out direction of the word denoting that object. However, in the case of person names, no moderation due to person va-lence was found, possibly because the computer game sce-nario was too abstract, or villains are seen as attractive and in-teresting dramaticﬁgures instead of as being purely negative. This basic effect of higher positivity of inward compared to outward words has been replicated by independent re-search groups in US samples (Kronrod, Lowrey, and Acker-man 2015) and Portuguese samples (Godinho and Garrido 2015), of course, carefully adapting the stimulus words to the respective phonation rules of those languages. Further-more, in benchmarking how little is necessary to evoke this effect, Topolinski and Boecker (2016a) showed that this ef-fect occurs also for shorter words, such as EKOP versus EPOK, and even for simple consonant pairs, such as KP ver-sus PK (experiments 1–4). Moreover, the effect occurred also when participants did not read the words but listened to a speaker uttering these words (experiment 2). What was also found is that the distance that is covered by the inward and outward jump, respectively, determines the strength of the effect. Consider the letter pair BL. This is an inward jump from the lips to the front of the tongue. Now consider the letter pair BK. This is also an inward jump, however, this time from the lips all the way to the back of the mouth. Thus, BL entails a small and BK a large inward jump, just as their counterparts LB and KB entail a small and large outward jump, respectively. In manipulating the articulation direc-tion (inward vs. outward) orthogonally to distance Topo-linski and Boecker (2016a, experiments 6–7) found that the larger the distance that was covered by the jump the stronger the in-out effect was. That is, small jumps such as BL versus LB elicited small in-out effects, but large jumps such as BK versus KB elicited large in-out effects.

In further experiments, it has been shown that more complex combinations of inward and outward patterns can also elicit evaluative consequences. Topolinski and Bakhtiari (2016) designed words that featured sequential

inward-outward movements within themselves, namely, moving ei-therfirst inward and then outward, (e.g., FOLOKOLOF) or movingfirst outward and then inward (e.g., KOLOFOLOK). They found that the ultimate movement trajectory of the word determines its likability: Participants preferred words that movedfirst outward and then inward more than words that movedfirst inward and then outward. This does indeed make ecological sense regarding consumption behavior, since it is the eventual oral response that we do with an object that reflects its evaluative meaning for us. Consider, for in-stance, taking a sip from milk that you found in your fridge (an inward movement), tasting it, realizing that it is spoiled, and spitting it out (an outward movement). Here, although you initially executed an inward movement, the eventual aversive response of expectoration was an outward move-ment reflecting the inedibility of the food. Also, this find-ing reflects findings from manual approach-avoidance move-ments where it was also found that the last direction that is executed in sequential manual movements is determining the affective value of the movement (Krieglmeyer, De Houwer, and Deutsch 2011).

Besides a motivational approach-avoidance explanation referring to the biomechanical resemblances between in-ward and outin-ward articulation on the one side and con-sumptive and expectorative eating behavior on the other side, as Topolinski et al. (2014) had developed in their orig-inal publication, another much more parsimonious explana-tion might be applied: inward articulaexplana-tion is simply easier than outward articulation. As we have outlined in the intro-duction, pronunciation ease is a powerful determinant of word liking, and it might be that inward words might roll of the tongue more easily than outward words. This was tested by Bakhtiari, Körner, and Topolinski (2016), who as-sessed both the positivity and pronunciation ease of inward and outward words (e.g., by letting participants rate how easy to pronounce a given word is). They found that inward words are indeed rated as being easier to pronounce than outward words, and that pronunciation ease correlated with preference on an item-level. However, in a mediation anal-ysis it was found that although pronounceability explained a part of the in-out effect on preference, it did not fully medi-ate the effect; and the impact of inward and outward direc-tion on preferences remained signiﬁcant when including pronounceability as competitive predictor.

In yet another line of research Topolinski et al. (2015) explored to which degree inward and outward articulation would interact with the meaning of the denoted object. Mind that in Topolinski et al. (2014) the effect was found for both

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person names denoting positive (a hero) and negative (a vil-lain) persons. Thus, the evaluative meaning of the denoted object unlikely moderates the in-out effect. However, the oral response that is tight to a certain object might do. While most of the objects that are associated with mouth move-ments evoke inward consumptive movemove-ments (all edible foods and beverages but also cigarettes or pills), some rare objects do indeed entail expectorative outward movements, such as chewing tobacco or breathalyzers. Using such expectoration-related objects Topolinski et al. (2015) found an in-over-out effect for edible and positive objects, such as lemonades, but a attenuated or even reversed out-over-in effect for objects that trigger expectoration, such as toxic chemicals (spitting out) or bubble gum ( blowing air out).

To conclude, in these basic research paradigms it was re-liably found that inward articulation is preferred over out-ward articulation. In the next section I will review more ap-plied studies that explored the managerial implications for marketing and advertising utilizing the in-out effect.

EFFECTS ON CONSUMER ATTITUDES

In several studies it was tested whether the articulatory in-out effect can be used to actually shape consumer attitudes beyond artiﬁcial liking ratings, thereby providing ways in which this effect might be used for managerial purposes. These studies are reviewed in the following section along with direct propositions for future research and practical applications.

Making Money with Articulation Directions: Product Appeal and Willingness to Pay

The most important question for consumer research is of course whether the basic in-out preference effect for sim-ple (person) names would generalize to actual consumer at-titudes pertaining products. This was tested in a series of ex-periments by Topolinski, Zürn, and Schneider (2015). In the ﬁrst study, participants received inward and outward words, and these words were labeled as possible brand names for different products. Four product categories were chosen for which real-life product names are also often rather artiﬁcially sounding nonsense words, namely, antivirus software, smart-phone apps, painkillers, and pest control products. The latter product was particularly chosen to see whether the in-out ef-fect would also occur for products with disgust-related asso-ciations. Participants were asked how much they liked the possible brand names for the respective product categories. The result was that although the products themselves varied in likeability (with painkillers and apps rated more favorably

in general than antivirus programs and pest control), in-ward brand names were always preferred over outin-ward brand names, regardless of the product. This shows that inward branding can indeed foster consumer attitudes—even for negatively associated products.

In a further step, the authors generalized the effect to purchase intentions as one of the most important measures of consumer attitudes (e.g., Newman, Diesendruck, and Bloom 2011). Thus, instead of their liking, participants in this study were asked to report how likely they would purchase a given product (Topolinski et al. 2015; experiment 2). Again, it turned out that participants reported a higher purchase in-tention for products named with inward brand names than with outward names.

In four further studies (experiments 3a–4) the authors then went on to assess the crucial variable when it comes to managerial considerations, namely, the price participants report to be willing to pay for a certain product (e.g., Adaval and Wyer 2011). In these studies, participants were de-scribed a certain product (e.g., a chocolate bar) and were given a name for that product that was either an inward or an outward name. Then, they were asked to report their willingness to pay on a scale from 0 to 500 cents for that product. Across several studies and products participants reported higher willingness to pay for products named with inward than with outward names. For instance, in experi-ment 3a they reported being willing to pay 92 cents for a chocolate bar when it was named with an inward brand but 78 cents when it was named with an outward brand; and in experiment 4 they reported 107 cents for a pain killer with an inward brand name but 99 cents for a painkiller with an outward name. These differences amounted to up to 13% of the general estimated value of a given product, which is a substantial price gain given this subtle manipu-lation of linguistic brand-name features. Furthermore, the authors compared inward and outward articulation against a baseline of brand names that did not feature any system-atic inward or outward moving (experiment 3c). It turned out that this control condition elicited levels of willingness to pay comparable to inward articulation. Thus, at least in this setup, the effect is driven by a more negative ment due to outward moves, not by a more favorable assess-ment due to inward moving.

However, in all of these studies only the product and its name were provided as information to inform consumers’ judgment. The question is whether this effect would also occur if there is other, more objective information on the product. Therefore, in aﬁnal study the authors added

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im-portant information about the product’s quality in addi-tion to the name (experiment 5). Speciﬁcally, they presented again ostensible inward and outward brands for chocolate bars but added the information whether or not the choco-late was produced in a fair-trade manner or not. This infor-mation was manipulated orthogonally to articulation direc-tion. It turned out that although participants reported a generally higher willingness to pay for fair trade than for non–fair trade chocolate, they still reported higher willing-ness to pay for chocolate bearing inward than outward brand names. Speciﬁcally, they reported 151 cents for in-ward and 146 cents for outin-ward fair-trade chocolate, and 89 cents for inward and 84 cents for outward non–fair trade chocolate.

Thesefindings show that the articulatory in-out effect found in basic psychological research on preference for non-sense words and target person can well be generalized to consumer attitudes toward novel products, applying to prod-uct liking, purchase intention, and even willingness to pay. Particularly the latter variable is of great managerial interest, since there is hardly any other costless marketing strategy that produces such possible profit gains. Given the finding that inward names evoked similar willingness-to-pay levels as control stimuli (Topolinski et al. 2015, experiment 3c), the practical strategy would be to avoid outward names. Im-portantly, articulation direction evoked its effect even in the presence of other, much more objectively diagnostic informa-tion, namely the quality of the product (experiment 5).

Future research might analyze the inward-outward ten-dency of actually existing brands and explore their relation to the performance of these brands, similar to Alter and Oppenheimer’s (2006) analysis of the price development of shares at the stock market.

What’s on the Menu? In-Out Effects on Food Perception and Actual Food Consumption

When considering approach and avoidance movements of the mouth and its possible applications for naming prod-ucts, the most obvious connection is to food and its appeal. Speciﬁcally, it can be predicted that any kind of food is rated as being more palatable when it is named with an in-ward than with an outin-ward name.

This was tested by Topolinski and Boecker (2016b). In a ﬁrst experiment they only presented inward and outward words to participants and told them that these words would be names of foreign dishes. It turned out that participants rated the inward dish names as being more appealing than

the outward dish names (experiment 1). Then they moved over to present real images of dishes along with the inward and outward names (experiment 2). To explore whether the individual appeal of the dishes themselves would moderate the in-out effect, they divided the stimulus pool of images of dishes into more and less appealingly looking images (as determined by independent raters in a pilot study). In this setup, no effect of in-out articulation direction was found at all, neither for more nor for the less appealing dish images. The authors explained this with the fact that the actual vi-sual information in the images of the dishes overran the more subtle in-out effect: the dishes varied so blatantly in their appeal that participants ignored the verbal information of the name and only considered the visual display of the dish itself. To avoid this, in aﬁnal study (experiment 3) they chose more homogenous images of foods. Speciﬁcally, they pre-sented various images of different specimen of green beans, cheeses, orange juices, and red wine bottles along with osten-sible brand or sort names that were again either inward or outward words. Although, of course, these four product cat-egories differ largely from each other, the different specimen within each category looked highly similar to each other. In this setup a robust articulation effect occurred, with products named with inward words were rated as being more palatable than products names with outward words.

This set of studies shows that the articulatory in-out ef-fect is subtle and can easily be overridden by more obvious affective cues such as the real palatability of foods. Thus, as a practical implication, naming one’s dishes with inward words on the menu would only work when there are no ad-ditional images of the dishes depicted on that menu. More-over, when visual information of the actual product is read-ily available to the consumer, branding would only proﬁt from choosing inward names in cases where the different options do not differ much from each other in their visual or other perceptual or quality-related features. This would be the case for highly uniform products such as different sorts of fruits or vegetables, or any standardized and sealed products.

Furthermore, Rossi, Pantoja, and Borges (2015) named foods with either inward or outward names and asked par-ticipants for more diverse ratings on these foods beyond simple palatability. They found that inward compared to outward named foods were rated as being less healthy, more desirable, and higher in calories. Thus, the tempting palatability induced by inward articulation patterns might backﬁre when it comes to perceived healthiness and when applied to healthy foods, although an orthogonal

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manipu-lation of healthy versus convenience or junk food is still to be realized in future studies.

Going even further, in a recent set of studies, Rossi et al. (2017) used oral inward and outward articulations to affect actual food consumption. They let participants articulate inward and outward names and then consume a freely cho-sen amount of treats. Participants in those studies actually consumed more food that was named with inward names than with outward names. This shows that articulation pat-terns of names actually have the power to even affect con-sumption behavior, which opens up possible future applica-tions on self-regulation and fostering dietary behavior. Whom to Click? Usernames in Digital Interactions We live in a consumer world of an exploding eCommerce domain in which digital interactions play the dominant role (Degeratu, Rangaswamy, and Wu 2000). A peculiar quality of digital economy and online marketing is that we have only little information available of the“faceless and intangi-ble” digital agents we deal with (Beldad, De Jong, and Stee-houder 2010). For instance, when scanning over the many sellers offering secondhand smartphones on eBay or the many hotels that offer themselves on booking.com when we try toﬁnd an accommodation for the next conference, we are left with little more than their names, some pictures, and their reputation (such as in the star rating systems). However, most of the offers have splendid reviews and highly favorable reputations, and the pictures of the prod-ucts or offers are interchangeable. In these interactions, the name of the digital interaction partner becomes more important in remaining the last individuating information. It is likely that articulation direction of the names of such digital interaction partners might thus become a way to in-ﬂuence consumer choices.

To test this, Topolinski et al. (2015, experiment 7) told participants that they would enter an online chat forum and were allowed to choose which partners they would eventually chat. To choose possible chatting partners, par-ticipants were presented with the ostensible usernames of candidates, always two users at a time. Without partici-pants knowing about the hidden articulation manipulation, they always received one username with an inward and one username with an outward articulation pattern. It turned out that participants chose the inward username more of-ten than the outward username, namely, in 52% of the cases. Although this advantage of inward names is small numeri-cally, it was statistically signiﬁcant.

Moreover, Silva and Topolinski (2017a) presented par-ticipants with screenshots of ostensible eBay seller proﬁles. The usernames of the sellers were again either inward or outward words. The participants were asked to rate their spontaneous impressions of how trustworthy the respec-tive seller is. It turned out that sellers with inward user-names were rated as being more trustworthy than sellers with outward usernames.

These demonstrations show that articulation directions can play a role in digital interactions. Particularly in this do-main were we can freely chose a username future manage-rial considerations might consider choosing inward over outward articulation patterns. The same holds true for pri-vate decisions on login names and e-mail accounts. Although usually e-mail accounts consist of contractions or slight mod-iﬁcations of our real names, we can still chose inward con-tractions: For instance, the person Rob Livelle might avoid the abbreviation [email protected], which would be two out-ward syllables and thereby less of an advantage and rather choose [email protected], which is a perfect inward word and thereby more appealing. Future research might assess the articulation tendency of actually existing usernames or accounts and correlate this tendency with the selling perfor-mance to explore to what degree articulation tendency does actually affect economic performance.

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK

The bulk of recent evidence reviewed here show that a su-perﬁcial feature of names that is rarely noticed by people, namely, the mouth movements required for the articula-tion of a word, can elicit spontaneous feelings. When the articulation spots that produce the consonants in a word systematically move from the front to the back of the mouth, resembling eating-like peristalsis, compared to when they move outward, the mouth, a word, a name, and even the bearer of that name are liked more. This effect does spill over to consumer attitudes, with inward compared to out-ward patterns increasing positive attitudes toout-ward product, purchase intentions, and willingness to pay. Moreover, in-ward branding makes foods perceived as being more palat-able (but also more caloric and unhealthy) and prompts indi-viduals to eat more of that food. Finally, using inward names in digital interactions triggers more favorable attitudes and higher trustworthiness of the bearers of such names. Thus, implementing systematic articulation patterns in branding proves as a powerful and versatile tool to shape consumer attitudes. In the following section, I outline some future re-search avenues that might deserve some attention.

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Underlying Mechanisms

Surely the most interesting research avenue is to explore the actual embodied and cognitive mechanisms driving the articulatory in-out effect. One sensorimotor mechanism as-sumed is subvocal articulation simulations: when silently reading the brand and person names, participants uncon-sciously engage in silent subtle imitations of actually utter-ing the name. It has been shown in earlier research on other articulation effects that these subvocalizations can be inter-fered with by engaging the mouth in other motor tasks, such as chewing a piece of gum (Topolinski and Strack 2009, 2010; Topolinski 2012) or eating popcorn (Topolinski et al. 2014). Suggesting that subvocalizations do play a causal role in the in-out effect, Topolinski et al. (2014) replicated the paradigm in a pathological sample of aphasic patients, who lack subvocalizations due to damage of the verbal brain areas. In that sample, no in-out effect was detected.

To further test the role of subvocalizations experimen-tally, most recently Lindau and Topolinski (2017) set out to test the susceptibility of the in-out effect to various oral secondary tasks, such as chewing a piece of gum, whispering an unrelated word, or executing meaningless tongue move-ments. To their surprise, the in-out effect was not at all moderated by these tasks but emerged strong and reliably even under oral motor-interference. Thus, the conceptual derivation and testing of other possible underlying mecha-nisms is needed, with a possible candidate being the struc-ture of language itself. It is indeed possible that inward trajectories are more common in human language and are therefore liked more than outward trajectories, which is to be tested in future research.

Cross-Language Interactions

Languages differ in the way they translate letters to pho-nemes (Ladefoged 2001), which is particularly important for articulation effects that exploit articulation spots (such as the in-out effect reviewed above). For instance, the letter R is most often pronounced as an alveolar approximant in English (such in CAR or RAT), being formed with the large front part of the tongue, while is often pronounced as a uvu-lar trill in German and other languages, being formed the very rear part of the tongue. Thus, while R has a rear artic-ulation spot in German, it has a middle articartic-ulation spot in English. Therefore, in the replications of the in-out effect in English language the stimuli used did not contain the let-ter R (see Topolinski et al. 2014). Similar such cases are the letters G, C, and H, whose letter-phoneme translation also varies across and even within languages (IPA 1999), while

other letters have an unequivocal universal matching pho-neme, such as the letters B, M, and P. Thus, when imple-menting articulation effects in different markets, the na-tional language has to carefully be considered. Also, future research might take advantage of such differences experi-mentally by showing that the same word elicits different attitudes in different languages, simply because it evokes different articulation patterns.

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