Using eye movements during reading as an implicit measure of the acceptability of brand extensions

We apply eye movement monitoring techniques to examine how acceptable consumers find different brand extensions. Participants were presented with sentences (e.g. I wanted to record a song on Polaroid, but it cost too much.) which could only be fully understood if they made an inference that was based on extending the meaning associated with the brand name. By building on work on the processing of metonymic expressions (Frisson & Pickering, 1999) we predict that plausible brand extensions will cause little difficulty during initial reading, but that implausible extensions will cause immediate disruption. Analyses of the eye‐tracking data confirmed these predictions. Plausible extensions led to minor reading difficulty during late processing of the sentence, which we interpret in terms of the construction of a new interpretation associated with the brand. Implausible extensions, in contrast, caused immediate disruption, which we interpret in terms of the difficulty of providing a coherent interpretation for the term. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.