Meaningless Descriptors Increase Price Judgments and Decrease Quality Judgments

Consumers commonly encounter products with descriptors. Descriptors with meanings understood by consumers clearly affect judgments of the described products. However, can descriptors for which consumers do not know the word’s semantic meaning (as is increasingly common in a globalized world) still affect judgments in systematic ways, via altering the product’s perceived prototypicality? We examine two kinds of judgments that typically move in...