[Excerpt from the article https://www.npr.org/2019/06/28/73694...-of-who-we-are]

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/Getty Images

"I sort of settled on this idea that I would try to be...a boundary-spanner," he says. "So I hung out with the nerds, I hung out with the jocks, I hung out with the musicians."

As he spent time with these different cliques, he noticed that each had its own set of badges, its own language. And he realized that if he could speak that language, adopt those badges, he would start to blend in. So he started wearing the things the other kids wore. With the athletes it was Nikes. With the musicians, Chuck Taylors. With the hip hop kids, Adidas – but without the shoelaces. It was like a costume, but deeper.

"A brand is so much more than a tagline or a logo," he says. "It is more of a meaning system."

[Excerpt from the transcript: https://www.npr.org/templates/transc...ryId=736942500]
VEDANTAM: So when you think about brands in the way that you're describing them - not as tags or even as just as names or commercial, a way to sort of commercially identify a product, but really as stories, as narratives - how valuable are these stories, commercially speaking?

REED: Oh, they're tremendously valuable. And the reason that they're valuable is because they create a kind of impervious connection that's hard to break. If a consumer connects with a brand or a product in terms of an identity argument instead of an argument about how better the features are of the product compared to something else they could buy, then what is happening is that there is an insulation from the brand's competitive attacks because once a person believes that a brand is part of who they are, then asking them to go to another brand is essentially asking them to change who they are. And that is an incredibly powerful psychological gravitational pull that is really hard to overcome.

And that value in terms of customer lifetime value is a real, like, economic entity because it literally means that the person is going to be onboard and be buying for a very long time and be willing to do your own marketing basically for free because they are advocates of the brand. They are what we refer to as brand evangelists because they are now willing to go out there and protect the brand. So that value is massive in terms of creating this type of connection that can last with consumers for a very long time.

[...]

VEDANTAM: Now, there are lots of people, Americus, who think that the idea of building a brand is just distasteful; it's just marketers and big companies trying to hoodwink customers, hoodwink consumers. Frank Germann, Aaron Garvey and Lisa Bolton once conducted an interesting study involving Nike putters. And when I spoke with Frank Germann, here's how he explained the study to me.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

FRANK GERMANN: About half of the participants were told that they would be putting with a Nike putter, whereas the other half of participants were not told what putter brand they would be using. Importantly, all participants used the exact same putter. And, you know, interestingly, our results showed that those who thought that it was a Nike putter on average needed significantly fewer putts to sink the golf ball.

VEDANTAM: What's going on here, Americus? In some ways, this is connected to what you were telling me about wearing your Lance Armstrong gear and biking and feeling like you were doing better. But this actually suggests this isn't just a feeling; you actually might have biked better when you were wearing your Lance Armstrong gear.

REED: What it literally shows is the placebo effect, which is what they are really tapping into here, is real. You have been told about "Just Do It" for so long you believe that that brand endows a performance advantage, so much so that the psychological perceptions of that brand literally translate in your ability to actually perform, to make those putts in fewer strokes. And that, to me, is the most salient and powerful example of this notion that the power of brand is so intertwined with the perceived expectations of the behavioral activities that are built into that narrative or that story about the brand that they literally translate into advantages for the brand that really shouldn't be there, for all intents and purposes.

[...]

VEDANTAM: You conducted a study [...] - how we sometimes decouple problematic aspects of a brand with the things that we admire about the brand. If Lance Armstrong had been caught stealing rather than doping, I'm wondering if you could have decoupled your admiration for Lance Armstrong the athlete with your distaste. Was the fact that the unethical behavior was in the same domain as his accomplishment that made them difficult to disentangle?

REED: In the paper that you reference there, we refer to this notion that you're talking about as moral decoupling. And so it's based on the fundamental premise that if there is an individual that you have a natural inclination to want to support, then what we know about psychology is that humans will figure out ways to rationalize the support for that individual that they want to support to uphold a belief that they want to have. And so they will try to interpret the world around them in ways that allow them to uphold those beliefs.

So for example, let's take the example of Tiger Woods, who recently came back after a long layoff of a lot of tragedy and challenge, both physically, professionally and personally. If you look at his story, what did he do? Well, he cheated on his wife. And so cheating on your wife presumably has nothing to do with your golf game. So if you desired to support Tiger Woods, you could make the mental argument in your mind that would reflect moral decoupling. You could say, well, you know, I don't really agree with this whole thing that he might have been doing in his personal life. However, I really like his golf game, so I'm going to continue to support him.

And so what's interesting about moral decoupling - if that bad thing that the celebrity or the person does is not related to the performance that you admire, then you can pull it apart in your mind, and you can almost ignore, if you will, or not even comment on the morality of the bad thing because you can simply focus on the performance and the fact that you admire what they do in that performance domain.

"Identity-based consumer behavior" (PDF) Americus Reed II, Mark R Forehand, Stefano Puntoni, Luk Warlop in International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2012.

"Performance Brand Placebos: How Brands Improve Performance and Consumers Take the Credit," (PDF) by Aaron Garvey, Frank Germann, and Lisa Bolton in Advances in Consumer Research, 2015.