Buyer beware of your shadow: The role of motivation in preferences for name letter brands

In this research I attempt to elucidate the process underlying implicit egotism, the unconscious tendency for people to gravitate toward things, including brand names, that resemble themselves. Prior research has not systematically examined the influence of motivation on implicit egotism, though it is sometimes required to observe the phenomenon and may have been unknowingly present in prior studies. I propose a framework that casts implicit egotism as an associative, automatic phenomenon whose influence on preferences is affected by motives related to self-concept maintenance. Thus the first aim of this research is to disentangle automaticity and motivation in implicit egotism. The proposed framework predicts that implicit egotism should be stronger when people are motivated to boost self-esteem, but the effect should reverse when people are motivated to protect self-esteem. This self-protection motive has previously been unexplored in research on implicit egotism. Thus, the second goal of this research is to explore and test this new phenomenon whereby people avoid self-resembling things, an effect I call implicit distancing. Finally, this research aims to identify marketer-controlled variables in the process so that name letter branding and implicit distancing can be put to practical use.;Two experiments and a field study bear out the major tenets of the framework. Self-protection is indeed an important variable in determining the effects of self-resemblance on preference. In one experiment participants preferred brand names that resembled their own for a positive product, but preferred dissimilar names for a negative product. In a second experiment, which employed an auction scenario, participants preferred sellers with screen names similar to their own names when the transaction was low risk. But when the transaction had high risk, participants preferred sellers with screen names that were different from their own names. Importantly, these implicit distancing effects observed in both experiments reverted to implicit egotism when participants were under high cognitive load. This supports the idea that implicit egotism is fundamentally an associative, automatic phenomenon. Last, in a field study examining actual Internet auction transactions, high levels of risk lead buyers to avoid sellers with screen names similar to their own.