Investigating Brand Verbal Fluency: When known brands do not come to mind

We define Brand Verbal Fluency as the ability of a consumer, when cued with a product category, to name the brands he or she knows in that category. We see that frequently not all the known brands come to the consumer’s mind (62% failure in our sample). Our analysis of which brands are named (and which ones are not) builds on findings from psychological research on Semantic verbal fluency (the ability to name items in a category, for example, animals). We adopt an innovative micro-analysis at the level of consumer–brand dyads to investigate the Brand Verbal Fluency of consumers aged 19–77 in the category of radio stations. Prior research would almost certainly have predicted a negative impact of consumer age on brand verbal fluency, mediated by declining cognitive ability, but this holds only for recent brands. Older brands appear to be less prone to the danger of not coming to the mind of older consumers.