Name-Letter Effect

What it is

Nuttin, at the University of Leuven, asked people to circle their preferred letter from a series of pairs, without telling them that some of the letters came from their own names. They favoured their own name letters. A 1987 study found the effect across twelve European languages, and a 1990 follow-up by Hoorens, Nuttin and colleagues found it in Flemish, Hungarian and Thai children and in both the Thai and Roman alphabets.

Miguel Brendl and colleagues carried the idea into shopping in 2005. Across five experiments in the Journal of Consumer Research, people were more likely to choose a brand whose name began with letters from their own, and the pull was stronger when a matching need was active, such as thirst when choosing a drink. The authors called it name letter branding.

A name also draws attention. In shadowing experiments, where people repeat one message aloud and ignore another, about a third noticed their own name in the ignored message in Neville Moray's 1959 study, 34.6 per cent in a 1995 replication and 29 per cent in a preregistered one in 2021. In a 2018 field experiment by Navdeep Sahni and colleagues, adding the recipient's name to an email subject line raised the open rate from 9.05 to 10.80 per cent.

In effect

A brand whose name shares your initials may get a slight edge in a quick choice, especially when you already want something of that kind. It is a small tilt, not a reason a product is better, and it is worth noticing when you choose between near-identical options.

What it does not say

The effect concerns preferences for letters and, in the laboratory, for brand names. It does not support the claim that people choose spouses, towns or jobs that resemble their names. Uri Simonsohn reanalysed those archival findings in 2011 and concluded they were most likely caused by cohort, geographic and ethnic confounds and reverse causality; The Choice Factory relates his result in Bias 22, page 148. His critique did not test laboratory brand choices like Brendl's. The brand studies measure choices in experiments, not sales.

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