Serious golfers have been known to do pretty much anything to improve their golf game. That can lead to many superstitions, such as wearing plaid or extreme devotion to a particular brand of putter.
As it turns out, that kind of devotion pays off. According to a study by Notre Dame University, researchers had 100 students using Nike putters to work on their short games while another 100 were given what they were told was a putter made by Starter. One brand was perceived as elite while the other was perceived to be weaker.
Fast Company reported that the students who knew they were using Nike putters needed 20 percent fewer strokes to sink their balls than the others, even though that second group was using the same exact golf clubs.
Another experiment had the students take a math test. Half were told they would be wearing a pair of foam earplugs made be 3M during the test and the other half weren’t told who made the earplugs. Those told they were wearing 3M earplugs did significantly better on the test than those who were not, according to Eureka Alert.
“Our results indicate that strong performance brands can cause an effect that is akin to a placebo effect,” said researcher Frank Germann of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “Our results also suggest that the use of a strong performance brand causes participants to feel better about themselves when undertaking a task – to have a greater task specific self-esteem. The higher self-esteem lowers their performance anxiety which leads to the better performance outcomes.”
Pros or not, the study showed another thing very clearly : Whenever anyone did well, he or she did not attribute that success to the tool they were using but rather their own personal skill levels. That’s not great news for brands that spend a lot of time, energy and dollars convincing people that their success is contingent upon their product.
