Shades of Meaning: The Effects of Color and Flavor Names on Purchase Intentions

A trip to the store these days reveals an interesting phenomenon – it is almost impossible to find items with traditional color or flavor names, such as red or grape. Gatorade offers beverages in Frost and Alpine Snow, while LL Bean offers colors such as mountain red and blue haze. Such naming strategies seem to be quite successful. Building on Grice’s (1975) theory of “conversational implicature,” we propose that consumers react favorably to the unusual names because they are essentially assuming that the marketing messages convey some useful information. Specifically, since consumers cannot interpret the literal meaning of the ambiguous label, they focus on what they assume is the pragmatic or underlying meaning or reason for the communication effort. Since consumers believe that packaging or advertising would only provide positive information, they make positive attributions about the brand based on the ambiguous descriptions. The results of three experiments provide empirical support for our proposal and rule out some alternative explanations for the success of ambiguous naming strategies.