Political conservatism and preference for (a)symmetric brand logos

Abstract

Processing fluency influences consumer preferences. In the current research, we introduce consumers’ political ideology as a potential moderator. We examine, in particular, if political ideology influences consumers’ preference for asymmetric brand logo designs. Because conservatives (vs. liberals) think more intuitively, they should dislike asymmetric brand logos more so than symmetric ones as symmetric brand logo designs are more fluent to process. We find support for this in four studies. Brand logos are a crucial element in an organization’s identity. Therefore understanding differences in how consumers respond to design changes based on underlying beliefs have implications such as click-through rates, which we show in our final study. Practically, brand logo designers will find our work useful since we suggest that consumers’ political ideology needs to be taken into account. Theoretically, we situate our work within the processing fluency and political ideology literatures at the intersection of marketing decisions.