Branded for Success

For aspiring athletes and novice performers, prepping for success may include hunting for a top-shelf golf club, electric guitar, or pair of shoes. But it's not just superior design that gives performance tools their power: Just thinking that a particular brand's products are especially effective may have a kind of placebo effect, researchers have found.

In a series of studies reported in the Journal of Consumer Research, participants received nearly identical tools for skill tests in golf and math. The only difference: Half of the putters bore Nike labels, while half of the earplug sets given to test takers were said to have been made by 3M. "If placebos can alter people's emotional states, we figured that could affect stress and anxiety in a way that could actually change performance," says the paper's co-author, Aaron Garvey, a marketing researcher at the University of Kentucky. Those who thought they were using a Nike putter indeed needed fewer putts, on average, to sink a ball, and participants who thought they had 3M earplugs during the math test answered more questions correctly.

The supposed brand-name equipment helped some more than others. By boosting self-esteem, the researchers found, using the products lowered anxiety, granting an edge to users who viewed stress as detrimental to performance. But those who considered pressure useful actually fared worse as a result of this intervention. Similarly, those with the lowest initial confidence in their abilities seemed to gain the most from the subtle upgrade.