The Journal of Marketing, published by the American Marketing Association (AMA), is arguably the most prestigious and influential journal in the entire field of marketing. If a paper is published here, it has survived one of the most brutal peer-review processes in academia.
But even so, obviously flawed articles make it through. In this paper I review: “BMW is powerful, Beemer is not: Nickname Branding Impairs Brand Performance” by Zhang, Ye and Thomson (2025).
The text tries to prove that when a brand uses a nickname created by consumers, it signals a “loss of authority” or a “submission” to the audience. This argument relies on the Speech Act Theory, where the authors argue that “naming” is a privilege of the powerful. Adopting a nickname is thus a sign of weakness. The text aims to prove that this perceived weakness (low brand power) is the exact reason why consumers stop buying. What they find though, is that nickname branding is unsurprisingly affected by many other criteria, such as (in my own words) the perceived intention of the advertisement and the perceived conformity of the organization.
But this paper falls short on several validity criteria. The remaining bit will argue why the text falls short on ecological and construct validity on the basis of a select few experiments; but these select few experiments represent an issue across the majority of the paper.
In Study 3a, the Wally vs. Walmart study, the respondents were asked which brand they found most “powerless, weak or powerful, strong” as an attempt to examine “brand power.” They then ran a mediation analysis with brand power as the mediator and purchase intention as the dependent variable. A potential issue is the fact that Wally sounds weak or powerless, while Walmart sounds more powerful. The issue here is that Wally might just score lower and affect purchase intention simply because it sounds silly. After all, Wally is a famous children’s cartoon book and Walmart is a powerful conglomerate—associations the respondents are likely to have, and associations that might affect purchase intention.
Study 5: Admittedly, in Study 5 the authors attempted to examine if this effect exists in fictitious competent vs. warm brands—essentially ruling out the case that it’s the associations customers have with Walmart and Wally. To represent competent/warm brands, they made up a fictitious law firm and charity called Atlantic Eagle, explained to the respondents that consumers named this brand “Birdie,” and stated that the firms were using the nickname Birdie in their advertising. The issue is that Atlantic Eagle is an apex predator and a birdie is synonymous with a small, unthreatening bird. Respondents might find that a law firm calling itself Birdie is hurt by the name itself, and not by the effect of submitting power to the customer.
This raises a question: why not test for the strength of the brand names?
In Study 4, the authors attempt to rule out competing mechanisms. They claim that because the Consumer-Brand Relationship scores did not shift after seeing the BMW ad, nicknames do not strengthen the consumer’s connection to the brand or act as an improvement to relationships. However, they cannot confidently rule out this mechanism because their experiment lacks ecological validity. They tried to measure fluctuations in a deep, longitudinal relationship using a single, 5-second exposure to a mock X post. True Consumer-Brand Relationships are an ecosystem built over time. They cannot declare that a marketing tactic fails to strengthen brand relationships when their experimental design—a single ad experiment—is most likely fundamentally incapable of shifting this metric in the first place.
They ran an experiment with an ad using the nickname and one with the real name, with the intention of testing Brand Power, Consumer-Brand Relationship, Brand Familiarity, and Brand Performance. They found that brand familiarity and customer brand relationships did not change after the experiment, but brand power and brand performance did. Therefore they conclude that it must be Brand Power that affects Brand Performance, with brand familiarity and customer brand relationships having little to no effect. This is obviously wrong, and contrary to existing research—which they, based on this experiment, conclude is wrong.
Consumer-Brand Relationships develop over time and include a broader ecosystem of previous product experiences, word of mouth, and so on.
Therefore, expecting a single ad to change this customer-brand relationship, just because the brand is using a nickname, is … I am out of words.
To finalize, while the methodology is obviously flawed and to a certain extent smells like “design bias” (trying to prove a point using sketchy methodology—in this case: garbage in, garbage out), the text does raise some relevant questions. Does the namer matter? For example, if the third party is not just ‘the public’ but a person of superlative status, such as royalty or a celebrity, does this affect the ‘power submitted’?
While the methodology is flawed, it could be relevant to properly investigate whether nickname branding is more powerful for brands with warm personalities or those emphasizing community values. Based on the paper, I have certain questions:
Is nickname branding more successful if the name has positive associations? To what extent does the original perception of the brand nickname matter? And does nickname branding work better for people who actually use the brand nickname?
Finaly, this paper passed the most brutal peer-review process in marketing, yet it bases its core conclusions on severe confounding variables and low ecological validity.
Gemini 3.0 Has been used “as a peer reviewer” and to improve readability.
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