Brand names taste better. That’s the conclusion from a savvy study of peanut butter and consumer choice.
The details were first reported years ago in The Journal of Consumer Research. They resurface in a new book by psychologist Gerg Gigerenzer about the “intelligence of the unconscious” (Gut Feelings, 2007, Viking-Penguin).
The study gave consumers a choice between three jars of peanut butter. In a pretest, consumers identified one brand as having significantly higher quality 60% of the time in blind taste tests.
Then the researchers put labels on the jars with another group of participants. One label was a well-known, heavily-advertised national brand. The other two labels were brands the participants had never heard of before.
The higher-quality peanut butter went into one of the jars with an unfamiliar label. Would the same percentage still chose the best-tasting spread?
Nope. This time, 73% chose a lower-quality product with the well-known brand name. Only 20% chose the high-quality product in the unfamiliar jar.
Similar results have come from other studies using blind taste tests among beer drinkers.
Bottom line: Name recognition has more influence than taste perception.
