Bottled Up or Poured Out: How Product Name Emotions Affect Appeal and Authenticity in the Market for Craft Beer

Abstract

Although we know that product names influence audience evaluations of producers and their offerings, mechanisms behind the effect remain undertheorized. We propose that a classic psychological stimulus-and-response process is at play. Emotional contagion suggests that emotions conveyed by product names will influence consumer evaluations. Although the process is psychological, social context shapes the strength and valence in the stimulus-and-response relationship. We predict that the antimass production ideology and oppositional identity of contemporary craft markets produce reverse emotional contagion: Positively charged product names lead to negative evaluations of products and negatively charged ones lead to positive evaluations. We also predict that product names shape audience attributions of authenticity: Positive emotionality decreases authenticity perceptions and negative emotionality elevates them. We find empirical support for most of our conjectures in regression analyses of the U.S. craft beer industry between 1996 and 2012. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and from the Lubar College of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2022.0178 .