Conceptual Framework and Hypotheses
When we ask consumers to name brands in a category, do they spontaneously mention all the brands they know? Semantic verbal fluency is the ability of a person to say as many words as possible from a semantic category learnt over his or her lifetime (the classic example being the category of "animals").1 We investigate Brand verbal fluency, which we define in a similar way as a consumer's ability to name as many brands as possible in the specific semantic category constituted by a product category. Brand verbal fluency is a critical...