Walk down any grocery aisle and you’ll spot them: 7Up, Five Guys, A1 Steak Sauce, Motel 6, Chateau Ste. Michelle. Numbers show up in brand names constantly, sometimes referring to something specific and sometimes seemingly plucked from thin air. Marketers have long assumed these digits help with memorability or convey a functional message. But could a number in a brand name actually change how a product tastes in the consumer’s mind, before they’ve taken a single bite?
A new set of studies published in Psychology & Marketing suggests the answer is yes, and the effect is more nuanced than you might guess. Numbers in brand names appear to bias flavor expectations upward, and the way those numbers are written, along with the vowel sounds they contain, shapes just how rich and layered a product seems.
The question behind the research
Nathalie Spielmann of NEOMA Business School in France, working with Diego Vega of the HUMLOG Institute at Hanken School of Economics in Finland, set out to investigate a gap in the marketing literature. Researchers have spent decades studying how the sounds of brand names influence perception. Names with certain vowels or consonants can make products seem lighter, faster, or sweeter. But numbers, despite being everywhere in food and beverage branding, had been mostly overlooked as sensory cues.
The authors wanted to know four things: Do numbers in brand names change taste expectations? If so, is it because numbers make a brand seem more complex? Does it matter whether the number appears as a digit (“8”) or spelled out (“eight”)? And does the vowel sound of the number itself matter?
To understand why any of this might work, it helps to know a bit about “processing fluency.” The idea, from psychology, is that when information is easy for our brains to handle, we tend to feel positively about it. But moderate difficulty, a slight bump in effort, can also send a signal, cueing us that something is elaborate, sophisticated, or premium. The researchers suspected that written-out numbers create just enough of that mental friction to make a food product seem more layered and interesting.
Four studies, four angles
The team tackled the question from multiple directions. The first study used an Implicit Association Test, a common psychological tool that measures how quickly people mentally link concepts together. Faster pairings suggest a stronger unconscious association. A group of 149 North American participants sorted fictional food brand names (some with numbers, like “8 Squirrels Nut Bars” or “Two Bears Fine Salt,” and some without) alongside taste-related words like “delicious” and neutral words like “commodity.”
Participants were noticeably quicker at pairing numerical brand names with tasty descriptors than with neutral ones. In other words, at a gut level, people already seem to associate numbers in food brands with flavor.
The second study moved from the lab to the real world of wine criticism. The researchers collected 695 professional tasting notes from Decanter magazine over a year, comparing wines whose brand or cuvée names contained numbers against those that didn’t. Wines with numerical elements scored higher on average (93.84 versus 93.15 on a 100-point scale). A closer look at the language critics used revealed another pattern: reviewers reached for more abstract, conceptual descriptors when writing about wines with numbers in their names, versus more concrete descriptors for wines without. That fits the researchers’ theory that numbers signal complexity.
Digits versus written words
The third study was a controlled experiment. Spielmann and Vega recruited 306 people online and showed them a mockup of a potato chip bag with one of three brand name styles: no number at all, a digit (like “3”), or a written-out number (like “three”). Participants then rated how tasty they expected the chips to be and how complex the brand seemed.
The written-number version consistently outperformed both the digit version and the no-number version on taste and complexity ratings. A statistical analysis confirmed the proposed chain of events: written numbers made the brand seem more complex, and that heightened complexity, in turn, translated into higher taste expectations. The digit version, by contrast, wasn’t significantly different from having no number at all.
Why would spelling out a number matter? The authors point to research showing that reading number words engages the brain differently than reading digits. Digits like “8” are processed quickly and efficiently. The word “eight” requires the brain to work through both sound-based and meaning-based routes at once. That extra bit of cognitive work, the researchers argue, gets misread as evidence that the product itself has more going on.
The vowel twist
The final study drew on a much larger real-world dataset: 1,032 wines scraped from Vivino.com, the popular consumer wine-rating platform. Here the researchers added a new variable, the vowel sound of the number itself. In linguistics, vowels are grouped by where they’re produced in the mouth. “Front” vowels (as in “three,” “six,” “nine”) are made toward the front of the mouth and tend to feel small, light, and precise. “Back” vowels (as in “one,” “two,” “four”) are produced further back and tend to convey largeness, richness, and heft.
The results showed that wines with back-vowel numbers received higher consumer ratings than wines with front-vowel numbers (3.85 versus 3.79 out of 5). And the effect was strongest when those back-vowel numbers were spelled out. Written “Two” beat written “Six.” For digits alone, the vowel didn’t matter much, presumably because a digit doesn’t force you to sound the number out in your head.
The researchers ran an additional check using only numbers 2 through 5 to make sure the effect wasn’t just about consumers preferring bigger numbers (assuming “higher is better”). The pattern held.
What this could mean for marketers
The practical takeaway is that the format of a number in a brand name is a design decision worth thinking about. For products meant to signal richness, depth, and sophistication (a bold red wine, an artisanal cheese, a premium chocolate) a spelled-out back-vowel number like “Two” or “Four” may prime consumers to expect a more elaborate flavor experience. For lighter, simpler products like sparkling water or citrus sodas, a digit or a front-vowel number may fit better.
The authors also suggest a possible public health angle. If written back-vowel numbers can make food seem tastier and more interesting, that framing might be applied to healthier options that tend to suffer from a reputation for blandness. On the flip side, they note the same cue could encourage overconsumption of indulgent items, so the ethics cut both ways.
Caveats worth noting
A few limitations are worth keeping in mind. The studies focused on English-speaking, largely Western consumers, and numerical symbolism and vowel associations vary considerably across languages and cultures. The number 4, for instance, carries unlucky connotations in parts of East Asia. The research also treats taste as a single global judgment rather than breaking it down into sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, and so on. And no one in these studies actually ate anything. The findings are about expectations formed from a brand name, not about whether a chip labeled “Eight Squirrels” would genuinely taste better on the tongue.
The researchers also acknowledge that consumer expertise likely matters. Wine drinkers who scrutinize labels closely may discount incidental cues that more casual buyers absorb without thinking.
