Brand antiquity and value perception: are customers willing to pay higher prices for older brands?

Abstract

Consumers’ choices and price-finding decisions are complex processes determined by a series of factors, most of which have been exhaustively studied in the academic and professional literature. However, one factor seems to have passed basically unnoticed until now, namely the brand’s antiquity explicitly announced in the companies’ logos (“Since…”, “Established in…” etc.). The present study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to analyse how brand antiquity may be perceived by consumers as an indicator of quality —as only brands that sell quality products are supposed to survive in a competitive market in the long run— and to have modelled an experiment to empirically test whether this perception results in a willingness to pay higher prices for products whose brands advertise the company’s antiquity than those which do not. Our results reveal that brand antiquity, indeed, has a statistically significant effect on consumers’ price setting.