Barbara E. Kahn

Barbara E. Kahn

Barbara E. Kahn is a marketing professor at the Wharton School and the co-author of the 2005 paper "Shades of Meaning" on colour and flavour names. Speaking to Knowledge at Wharton, she set out where she expected the effect to hold and where she expected it to weaken, and described those points as expectations, not test results.

Who they are

The Wharton faculty profile, read on 24 October 2026, lists Kahn as Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. It gives her earlier posts as dean and Schein Professor of Marketing at the University of Miami's School of Business Administration, vice dean of Wharton's undergraduate programme, director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center and executive director of the Marketing Science Institute. She is listed as a past president of the Association for Consumer Research. Her degrees are a PhD, MBA and MPhil from Columbia University and a BA from the University of Rochester.

The profile lists research areas including brand loyalty, consumer choice, decisions under uncertainty and ambiguity, product assortments, retailing and variety seeking, and books including Global Brand Power, The Shopping Revolution and Visual Marketing.

Key papers

Miller, E. G., & Kahn, B. E. (2005). Shades of meaning: The effect of color and flavor names on consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 86-92. doi:10.1086/429602.

Key ideas

Where she expected the effect to hold. Kahn told Knowledge at Wharton that the effect should work best for sensory products such as food and fashion, and probably fail in healthcare or financial services. She thought a strongly incongruent name could backfire, which the experiments did not test, and that the effect might fade as shoppers get used to odd names. See ambiguous colour names.

What the paper itself showed. Ambiguous names were preferred in student experiments, the preference vanished under distraction, and seeing a swatch before the name lowered satisfaction with ambiguous names.

This page keeps her stated expectations apart from the experimental results, as she did.

Sources

  1. Wharton School faculty profile for Barbara E. Kahn, read 24 October 2026.
  2. Knowledge at Wharton (2005). Florida red or moody blue? Study looks at appeal of off-beat product names. Secondary.
  3. Miller, E. G., & Kahn, B. E. (2005). Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 86-92. doi:10.1086/429602.