Exciting Brands Are Great — Until You Remember You're Going to Die

Written by Marie Brand, PhD Candidate at WU Vienna

While we humans know that we cannot live forever, ordinarily, we tend not to think too much about this unpleasant inevitability. But what happens to our preferences and choices in the marketplace when we get reminded of our own mortality, and how does it affect different brands? For example, might being reminded of our mortality make us more or less attracted to certain brands?

Antonios Stamatogiannakis, Assistant Professor of Marketing at IE University in Spain and his co-authors Polina Landgraf (UVA McIntire School of Commerce) and Haiyang Yang (Johns Hopkins Carey Business School) are exploring this question in their recent paper “How mortality salience hurts brands with different personalities”.

The paper describes how brands with different personalities might behave differently in the marketplace under different contextual circumstances, and in this case, mortality salience.

“People sometimes think that mortality salience is  “oh, my God, I'm about to die right now”. It’s more about making the (remote) possibility of our own death salient, because we usually don't go around thinking about dying. If we did, we would not be able to function.”

- Antonios Stamatogiannakis

Dramatic external circumstances often trigger awareness of our own inevitable death. The state of the world -- pandemics, military conflicts, violence in many places -- inspired Antonios’ thinking about mortality salience. Given frequent reminders of death, do consumers respond distinctly to different brands? Specifically, how do consumers respond to different brand personalities, which Antonios summarizes as “If this brand were a person, what type of person would it be?” He and his coauthors’ findings relate specifically to what they call “exciting” brands. Those are brands we consider as youthful, energetic, and full of life, like Red Bull, GoPro, or Nike. What Antonios and colleagues found is that when consumers think about their own mortality, they start disliking exciting brands.

When death is salient, we become averse to change.

Antonios explains the mechanism behind aversion towards exciting brands this way: Being reminded of the chance that we could die triggers an avoidance towards change. Exciting brands are linked to the notion of change to a, perhaps indefinite, future state of affairs; simply put, they tend to be a little bit unpredictable. But when mortality becomes salient, people don't like unpredictability and therefore react negatively to exciting brands. They don’t react the same way towards brands less linked to the notion of change.

“We look at it from a branding angle, so change spans everything related to the brand. Consumers expected mostly changes  on product, but exciting brands were also expected to change their distribution, their communication, and their target market. It all builds to a brand image associated with change in all these dimensions. Ultimately, when death is made salient, consumers tend to be averse to change embodied by exciting brands.”

- Antonios Stamatogiannakis

Embracing exogenous variation

When observing the consumer, the brand, and the consumer-brand relationship, Antonios argues that we sometimes tend to view this relationship from a static, dyadic point of view and forget about context effects. The same person can behave differently as a customer at different points in time, depending on the changing circumstances the consumer faces. Antonios remarks that preference for brands and brand personalities in these different situations of our lives is not very well understood yet. He argues that we often try to eradicate exogenous influences in the behavior lab to keep conditions as stable as possible.

“Of course people want to reduce complexity. Especially from the practitioner side, you want to have one consumer, not one consumer who wears 10 different hats during the day. But this complexity is what we should study more.”

- Antonios Stamatogiannakis

It Started with a Dataset—and a Team That Clicked

Antonios explains that the project grew from working on a Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) dataset during Polina’s PhD at IE University. The dataset includes consumers' brand evaluations of thousands of brands from numerous product and service categories.

They focused on consumer-based brand equity measures for thousands of brands in six sequential quarters, from the 1st quarter of 2001 to the 2nd quarter of 2002, covering the time preceding and following 9/11, a particularly distinctive event for mortality salience in the US.

Based on this, Antonios and his co-authors could show that the consumer-based brand equity of exciting brands significantly decreased following 9/11. However, the result was not found for brands with other personalities.

“This project started before COVID. COVID delayed us because we could not use the physical lab to recruit participants, and also because perceptions of mortality changed. It was hard to manipulate mortality salience anymore because, I presume, everybody was very high on mortality salience already.”

- Antonios Stamatogiannakis

They put the data collection on ice during COVID, but revisited prior studies and reanalyzed data to understand the process behind declining evaluations for exciting brands when mortality salience is high. Antonios reflects on the review process, which he remembers as refreshingly very focused, structured around refining the key message of the paper and sharpening the process rather than adding complexity.

When discussing his general approach to research, Antonios emphasizes that he’s motivated to work in a team, on what colleagues find interesting. For Antonios, having good people around is what makes research fun, but reflects that we work as part of a research community.

“When I was a PhD student, I got to meet Don Lehman from Columbia. He said, “I work in a team and whatever the team needs, I'm going to do it. Do they need me to design an experiment? I'm going to do it. Do they need me to study papers? I'm going to do it. Do they want me to do the analysis? I'm going to do it.” That was very inspirational. Finding a team and seeing how you can add value is what makes you very productive in this type of collaborative research environment. And you also have the varieties and breadth of the research process ahead of you.”

- Antonios Stamatogiannakis

Read the paper

Interested in reading all the details about mortality salience and how it affects brands with different personalities? Read the full paper here.

Want to cite the paper?

Polina Landgraf, Antonios Stamatogiannakis and Haiyang Yang (2024), “How mortality salience hurts brands with different personalities”, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 41 (2), 308-324.

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Meet Antonios Stamatogiannakis

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Teleportation. Basically, I split my time between Greece and Madrid. I work in Madrid, but my family and I live in Greece. I also have family in Crete and friends in many places around the world. It would be really nice to be able to see them more frequently. I could be here now, then have a class in Madrid in the afternoon, and then visit my brother in Amsterdam for the evening; that would be awesome.

If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

My wife, just the two of us. We have three kids, the oldest is five ½ and the youngest is three months old. So, when you become a family, sometimes you’re no longer a couple.

If you were not in academia, what would you do?

I was at a conference in San Francisco and tried Mexican food for the first time. When I got home, I tried to recreate it. At first, it didn’t quite work, but then I replaced the yogurt with cream cheese. I tried different kinds of peppers. Eventually, it came out closer to the original. And now my two older kids also cook with me. They both get very excited when we try a recipe and get to create something new, as well as when they take initiative in cooking something they already know.  

Cooking is a little like academia too. With each paper, you get to create a recipe and add it to the book.

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This article was written by

Marie Brand

Ph.D. candidate at the WU, Vienna