Role of brand in decision making is real, but consumers need to feel freedom of choice

Consumers prefer brands that they can relate to—ones that seem to match with their own identity. This suggests that it is a good marketing tactic to run advertisements that explicitly positions a brand with identities similar or identical to those of its target audience. However, as a recent New York Times article calls out, five 2014 studies published by the Journal of Consumer Research disprove this seeming logic, demonstrating that marketing messages explicitly connecting the brand identity to consumer identity actually reduce likelihood to purchase. This is because such overt messages actually highlight the external factors that influence a consumer’s purchasing behavior, making the consumer, in effect, feel less free in his or her identity expression. This drives consumers to avoid brands that they might otherwise prefer in favor of restoring their sense of freedom in decision making and purchase behavior. In other words, brand power exists but consumers want to feel they are making their own choices because of who they are and what they like, and that their decisions are not heavily influenced by the role of brand/marketing/advertising.

In the study that led to these conclusions, researchers gathered groups of roughly 120 people and encouraged them to focus on their environmental interests in order to activate their feelings of identity. They then broke the subjects into three groups and showed them each a different slogan for a biodegradable cleanser. One group saw a slogan without any identity reference (e.g., “a good choice for consumers”), one group saw a slogan with mild reference to identity (e.g., “a good choice for green consumers”), and the third saw a slogan with explicit identity reference (e.g., “the only choice for green consumers). Over fifty marketing experts predicted that the last slogan would be the most effective, when in fact it was the least effective. The study was repeated in several forms—all leading to the same conclusion: explicit identity-linked marketing messages have the opposite effect.

In the age of digital platforms, when the conversation between brand and consumer is no longer one way, or even two-way, but a continuous dialogue across multiple channels in real time, the learnings of this study are more important than ever before. Brand owners must be even more careful not to overstep their bounds in real-time social channels, where there is even more of an opportunity to overtly state shared identities. This opportunity is due to the fact that social media has given brands more of an identity in and of themselves, making them more human. It is also due to the fact that there it is easier than ever before to reach consumers and simultaneously harder to control your brand. Advice to marketers: know your consumers’ identity cold, dial-back the direct links, and let the consumer come to you (without them knowing you paved the way for them in the first place).