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Rock "personalities" study highlights worrying marketing practice: New Zealand researcher

Xinhua, September 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

A project that studied the "brand personalities" of rocks, which won an Ig Nobel Prize this year, had a serious point, one of the New Zealand researchers said Monday.

Massey University marketing lecturer Dr Mark Avis said he and his co-authors from New Zealand and Britain were happy to win the award, which was offered by genuine Nobel laureates at Harvard University in the United States this week.

Avis and his colleagues won a 10-trillion-Zimbabwe-dollar bill -- worth about 36 U.S. cents -- for a paper that critiqued the brand personality scales commonly used in marketing research.

"We always knew that our research project was unusual, as it is not often you get people to evaluate the sincerity of a rock," Avis said in a statement.

"We could see the humor in this when devising and conducting the research, but the underlying message of the research is more worrying than amusing."

Their paper explored the concept called "brand personality" or the "set of human characteristics associated with a brand."

The study tested whether Aaker's brand personality scale, which was widely used in research, actually created the brand personality that it measured.

Pictures of three rocks were put in front of 225 New Zealand students who were then asked which personality traits applied to each rock.

The rocks' "personalities" were described in great detail, including as "a big New York type businessman, rich, smooth, maybe a little shady," "a gypsy or a traveller, a hippie" and "liberal, attractive and female."

"We showed that, for a gift of some chocolate, research participants will be absurdly collaborative," Avis said.

"We also have research results which, if it were not methodological research, would statistically support the idea that people think of rocks as, for example, intelligent, honest and friendly."

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes honor "achievements that make people laugh, and then think," celebrating the unusual and imaginative to spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. Endit