Why a name that sounds foreign raises the price

The same moisturiser is offered as Silk Touch and as Toucher de Soie. The second version supports a higher price in test after test, and buyers asked why will describe the formulation — which is identical, from the same vat, in the same jar.

What everyone sees

Foreign naming is read as an appeal to national stereotype — French for cosmetics, Italian for design, German for machinery. Stereotype is part of it, but it does not explain the effect where buyers cannot identify the language or know the product is domestic. Something is operating below the level of country association.

What is actually happening

Leclerc, Schmitt and Dubé tested French versus English pronunciations of identical invented brand names and found the French pronunciation raising hedonic perceptions of the product, with the effect present even when respondents knew the brand was not French. Melnyk, Klein and Völckner examined the limits and found the advantage conditional on category fit and reversing where the foreign origin was incongruent with the product type — so this is a moderated effect, not a general rule. A plausible additional channel is processing fluency, since work following Reber and Schwarz shows that the ease or difficulty of processing a stimulus is misattributed to properties of the stimulus itself, and an unfamiliar name is processed slowly enough to feel like a distinct object.

Why it stays hidden

The mechanism hides because the buyer’s explanation is always about the product. Nobody reports paying more for a name. They report a texture, a finish, a quality of construction — and those reports are sincere, because the misattribution happens during perception rather than afterwards in reasoning.