Foreign Migration of Brands Discussed under the Light of Intersubjectivity Perspective: Illustration with a Case of Food Products

When producers intend to export a product abroad the original country, what about the impact of the brand on the new target of consumers? Will the few words composing the brand contribute to make people buy and eat the food product, or on the contrary will it make them push it away? Furthermore, might the possible negative effect of the brand exceed the single level of the product and extend to the level of the producer?

These questions referring to the communicational process of marketing and to the interaction of the consumer and the producer through the food product, the influence of perspective taking was analyzed in the light of the Intersubjectivity dynamic theory. For this aim, N=58 healthy adult subjects (English and French) were asked to assess two food products unknown of them (a foreign product and then a native language product) only on the basis of what was written on the package. For each sample of subjects, the foreign product presented the particularity that the writings on the package could be associated with another concept than that of the food product.

Results showed i) A positive direct perspective linked with the consumers’ intent to buy, ii) The confirmation of the intersubjective structure of trust, iii) A negative direct perspective towards the product leading consumers not to buy the product but not systematically, iv) A possible deterioration of the image of the producers perceived by the consumers due to the conceptual mismatch; this permitted to v) Identify the characteristics of contexts of distrust in the brand domain leading to identify intersubjective structures of distrust for the food products. It was then found and argued that these two last points could lead to a context of distrust towards the producers and consequently influence negatively the consumers’ perception of all the producers’ merchandises.

This approach and resulting conclusions will undoubtedly contribute to prevent commercial failures or reinforce commercial success whilst exporting food brands and to highlight possible subsequent effects on producers’ reputation.