Administrators at several of college football’s marquee institutions complained to Anheuser-Busch last year when the company marketed a line of team-color Bud Light cans to appeal to sports fans in select markets. Cans bearing their teams’ colors, the officials said, would falsely suggest that their colleges endorsed the product and would encourage binge drinking and consumption by minors.
But the true effect of these “fan cans,” according to two psychological-science researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia, could be even more insidious.
In a series of experiments, Chris Loersch, a postdoctoral researcher, and Bruce D. Bartholow, an associate professor, found that participants exposed to fan cans were more likely to rate beer consumption as less dangerous, indicate that they felt safe after being subliminally exposed to the word “beer,” and view their local party scene as less dangerous than did participants who were exposed to standard beer cans.
“We found that once people are exposed to fan cans, their perceptions of drinking in general ... are that it is safer,” Mr. Bartholow said in an interview. “We didn’t simply ask students whether drinking this beer is safer than drinking regular beer.” He said that would be “grossly oversimplifying” what the research found.
The study did not try to determine whether the team-color cans affected actual drinking behavior.
Mr. Bartholow said that a long line of social-psychology research had established that people feel safer and more trusting when they are within their own “in-groups.” So the researchers set out to learn how University of Missouri students would respond to beer cans labeled in black and gold—Mizzou fans’ “in-group-associated colors.”
The experiments suggested that the team-color cans “may have some consequences that the manufacturer never intended,” Mr. Bartholow said. “We suspect they were just anticipating an increase in sales, not the type of effect we found.”
What they found, Mr. Bartholow said, was that when products are packaged in a way that suggests group affiliation, they can cue the same feelings of safety and trust that individuals experience when they are among members of their own group.
Bud Light’s “Team Pride” campaign fizzled last year after Anheuser-Busch pulled the fan cans from several markets in response to complaints by 25 of the 27 colleges whose team colors were used.
Fans of professional football may be the next group to find safety in their suds. Anheuser-Busch has announced that starting in 2011 it will become “the official and exclusive beer sponsor of the NFL,” giving it the full use of National Football League logos and trademarks in its advertising and marketing.
Mr. Loersch’s and Mr. Bartholow’s paper, “The Color of Safety: Ingroup-Associated Colors Make Beer Safer,” is being published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.