Branding makes the food taste better

This is an interesting study: a taste test given to a bunch of 3-5 year old kids found that they find the food from McDonald's tastes better when they know its from McDonalds than when they think its from somewhere else. The children were given two identical foods: chicken mcnuggets, fries, etc. One set was in a McDonald's branded container, and one in a plain wrapper. Overwhelmingly, the kids thought the food in the branded container tasted better. There are also other interesting factoids, such as the kids with more TVs and/or who ate at McDonald's regularly were more likely to think the branded food tasted better.

I think this proves, basically, that preschoolers really don't know what they like.

I'm sure some politician out there is going "Why can't 3-5 year olds be allowed to vote!"

Heh.

Anyway, the reason I blog this is to show the strength of licenses. Even after we grow up and develop a certain jadedness to marketing, we can never quite get away from having more trust in brands we are familiar with, even if there's no real reason to trust them over something that is unfamiliar. Trust is an important part of the buying process: the buyer has to trust that he'll be entertained by a game before he'll purchase it. A license or a brand that the buyer trusts to be entertaining has more likelyhood of being bought than an unknown.