Are McNoodles and McDonald's kinship connected? Effects of linguistic information on consumers' categorization of new products

This paper examines how consumers process prefixed brand names (e.g., iTunes, iPod, iPhone) from a categorization perspective. Our attention primarily focuses on two category features, which are prefix and product similarity. Results of two studies using real (i.e., McDonald's) and fictitious brand names as stimuli demonstrate that the likelihood that consumers would consider a prefixed brand name (e.g., McNoodles) as affiliated with a master brand (e.g., McDonald's) is jointly determined by (1) the diagnosticity of prefix, and (2) the similarity between focal product and master brand. More importantly, prefix which is proposed to be processed earlier was found to be able to bias consumers' perception of product similarity, lending support to a sequential categorization process model.