THE HALO BLIND SPOT

A halo’s most consequential effect is not that people like a brand more. It is that they stop asking whether the other things about it deserve to be liked at all.

In fact, marketing, which has been at the game of building halos for decades, is pretty good at measuring what a halo brings to a brand, but hasn’t mastered the art of measuring what it takes away.

Numbers that are familiar with awareness, preference, loyalty, willingness to pay and success of a new product in the established product name.

There’s no such thing as a question a customer never asked.

It’s here that the true strength of the halo might be found.

The nature of the “halo”

The concept dates back to Edward Thorndike’s 1920 observations that people’s assessments of one characteristic could extend to evaluations of other characteristics. Nisbett and Wilson showed a few decades later that the general impression can influence ratings of individual attributes, even when the information available to them was sufficient for rating them separately. The more important point was that few people really knew that their decisions had been swayed in this manner.

This is different to positioning, which is important because the halo effect is sometimes mistaken for positioning.

Positioning is the key to a brand’s reputation.

It is the halo that follows.

You’re familiar with a brand, you like that brand, and you start to think that the other attributes of that brand are also good.

If the company produces one great product, its next product is perceived as safer.

It’s much more believable when people recommend someone who’s a celebrity.

A business has a reputation for innovation, a new claim will get less resistance.

The good opinion spreads.

At times, it goes farther than the evidence.

Marketers were taught how to create the shortcut.

What is interesting, is that marketers don’t just get “bonus” halos. They have gotten good at making them on purpose.

There is the halo product, one that has far more to do with its sales than its role. The presence can raise the impression of surrounding products.

Halo car is the car that is either expensive or technologically impressive and is likely to sell in relatively small quantities but could make the rest of the cars in the showroom more desirable.

There are brand extensions, umbrella brands and celebrity endorsements. Each relies upon something that is already believed to make something else more acceptable.

The best example is Apple’s iPod. In the mid-00s, it was openly discussed that there was an “iPod halo” around the Mac - people who bought an iPod were more likely to consider buying the Mac.

The reasoning is near too basic to be held up to ridicule.

You trust this.

This is made by them.

So this is likely to be trustworthy too.

And from the marketing point of view, it is absolutely priceless.

A brand is not required to begin anew each time it seeks a new decision.

Its previous determinations come with the consumer to the room.

The one way ledger.

This is where the typical measure of brand equity begins to feel like a incomplete one.

A halo is a tool that we measure.

Does awareness increase?

Does consideration increase?

Is there a premium that the company can charge?

Do customers sample the new product?

Is the extension successful?

Do they stay loyal?

All these are measurable.

However, think about the other way around.

What if the customer would typically compare 3 products but compares 1?

What if they were to read the ingredients normally but they don’t?

What if they would normally check out independent reviews but just get the feeling that the brand is sufficient?

What happens if there is information that contradicts the other, and it doesn’t get looked into?

None of these have a standard marketing metric.

No Dashboard line reads:

Questions stopped by our customers.

However, a powerful halo can have its best impact just where it may be needed most.

The brand isn’t just more convincing.

It has become more benign in its requirements for scrutiny.

Trust saves effort. That’s how it works!

That is not necessarily illogical.

We can’t explore all things.

People have to make thousands of decisions every day with limited information. We trust experts, institutions, brands, friends and familiar products because we cannot look at everything ourselves.

Part of this dilemma is captured in the concept of epistemic vigilance: one must have strategies to determine when information needs to be scrutinized, but scrutiny can require time and mental effort.

So we economize.

A trusted source turns into a shortcut.

This is a handy shortcut to use, as it is typically helpful.

The problem arises when trust becomes the basis to start with trust instead of evidence.

This is a significant limit. Not all bad news is welcome when it comes to a beloved brand. If consumers are committed to a brand, they are willing to actively challenge information that challenges their preconceptions about the brand.

While counterarguing and checking are not synonymous, they are closely related.

One says:

I witnessed all that and I refused to accept it.

The other says:

I never went so far as to look.

It is in that second space that it matters the most.

It’s all around us, and it’s in our daily food.

The majority of purchases are not considered a medical diagnosis or significant financial commitment. We don’t spend 1 hour on each packet of biscuits, each app subscription, each detergent, each restaurant etc. each pair of headphones.

We make use of our knowledge.

The halo helps that.

Blackberry: The days of yesterday’s strength are gone, gone, gone.

BlackBerry is an example that is useful because it was not built on nothing.

It was a true strength. Security, reliability, enterprise communication and the physical keyboard weren’t born of marketing people with a story to tell.

The issue is the smartphone market upended the questions.

The competition was no longer to have secure email or reliable communication. The value of touch, applications and developer ecosystems and consumer experience increased exponentially.

As the focus shifted to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms, BlackBerry was unable to catch up.

BlackBerry is a story that has a familiar lesson: BlackBerry underestimated the need to innovate.

That is too simple, however.

But the more intriguing is what its reputation allowed it to ignore.

When a business has been talking for years about being ‘serious’, ‘safe’, ‘business’, the product is judged accordingly.

However, market perceptions can shift quicker than reputations.

Then the salient questions change:

Where’s the development?

What is the size of the ecosystem?

So, what is it that users actually select?

What is the rate of platform change?

If the definition of a good smartphone changes, what happens?

A company does not need to be blind to those questions due to the halo.

It need just make them feel less urgent.

Theranos: when prestige starts behaving like evidence

Theranos is a much darker version of the same issue.

The company came in with a tinge of credibility.

Stanford. Check.

Prominent investors. Check.

Powerful endorsements. Check.

A charismatic founder. Check.

A revolutionary promise. Check.

The technology around it all seemed to be great.

Not any of those could answer the most important one:

Is there a problem with the technology?

But the failure of Theranos has shed light on the gravity of the neglect of that question. The company’s promises regarding the blood-testing technology didn’t hold up and the makeup of its board and the surrounding mystique of Holmes became part of the narrative of how the company managed to keep its credibility for so long.

It is at this point that the halo becomes hazardous.

It’s not the fault of the one who hears something and takes it as truth just because it sounds good.

It is letting evidence from one type assume the place of evidence from another type.

Education is what is demonstrated at Stanford.

If someone was impressed, then they are an impressive investor.

An endorsement from the famous is proof of trust in the company.

But none of these is a proof of the working of a blood-testing machine.

However, as more positive signals build up they may start to feel like evidence.

This is because the halo effect turns reputation into a sort of borrowed proof.

And borrowed proof remains unproven.

Maggi: the halo can endure when it’s out of tune.

There’s a wonderfully balanced counterpoint.

Maggi’s trouble in the Indian market in 2015 was one of the worst faced by a consumer brand. The product was withdrawn, removed from shelves and months later came under heavy public scrutiny.

This should have killed it, if it wasn’t for the halo effect which would be construed as consumers taking a brand for granted, even when there isn’t any proof.

The final option, however, was for Maggi to make her way back.

That doesn’t mean that people didn’t ignore the controversy, though. They did not.

It illustrates something more intriguing.

A load-bearing halo is possible.

A brand may have a ton of goodwill built up over the years, associations, memory, and trust are enough to keep a brand alive even when a significant rupture occurs.

This makes the argument very complicated.

The halo effect isn’t just about making people blind.

It’s a process that alters the point at which one changes one’s beliefs.

This can have a negative effect on the consumer sometimes.

In some cases it is beneficial to the brand.

At times it gives a brand enough strength to defy information that would kill a less well-known competitor.

It is this that makes the halo commercially useful.

The thing doing the checking now has a halo too

For years the brand was a trusted entity.

Now, something else is increasingly taking the place of that.

AI.

Users use AI to compare features, explain news articles, brief research, review claims and determine whether something sounds believable.

Theoretically, this should help us to be better checkers.

Rather than depending on the brand, one wonders a seemingly neutral system.

What about the system becoming liked itself, though?

That question is hard to ignore more and more these days.

Research in recent years has started to examine whether warmness — the “friendliness” and “agreeability” of the chatbot — could influence whether people check the accuracy of the answers a chatbot gives when they are provided with a check box to verify their accuracy.

The worrisome scenario isn’t just that individuals believe false data.

It’s because they might believe the source of the information, so they may not go back to check.

It rings a bell quite true.

The technology is evolved.

The psychological shortcut has not yet.

The AI dependency problem

In one study conducted at MIT in 2026, 67 participants were tracked for a four-week period as they used AI to assist them in assessing news.

The short-term findings were encouraging: participants were more adept at detecting misinformation when using AI tools.

However, there was a problem.

People who had relied on AI exhibited lower independent performance when the task was without AI. Some participants also felt that their ability had improved despite evidence that indicated that it had decreased.

That will be an awkward sort of halo.

The tool helps.

The tool is trusted.

The trusted tool checks more.

The human does less.

After a while, the humane will become less and less able to check independently while feeling more confident in the process.

In 1977, Nisbett and Wilson discovered that people didn’t know about the influence that was impacting their judgments.

The same fundamental issue manifests itself 50 years later in another form: individuals can lose track of how much of their evaluation they’ve delegated.

Sycophancy is the upside down halo

This is a particularly intriguing problem for AI reasons.

In addition to being judged on usefulness of answers, AI systems are also judged on how well it is liked by people.

That makes for some weird perverse motivation.

An error-prone system is not accurate.

A system that coincides with you will feel better.

Studies on AI sycophancy have shown that users can find systems that affirm them to be preferred even if it is not well-justified.

Then the old marketing mantra comes to mind.

When people like a brand, they are more susceptible to it persuading them.

The thing that provides the information can learn the same lesson, too.

Be warm.

Be agreeable.

Be reassuring.

Let the user know that you “get” them.

The outcome can be an information system that is very effective at putting the conditions in place where people don’t ask if it is “right.

Sycophancy might be more of an engineering issue, then.

It can be an engagement optimisation issue.

Marketing under the disguise of engineering.

The same trick that makes brands more popular now applies to the referee.

What is the relevant quantity to be measured?

The first thing that springs to mind is to be cynical.

Trust nothing.

Check everything.

Assume all brands are trying to take advantage of you.

However, that isn’t feasible and it’s not the point.

Trust is necessary.

The aim isn’t to get rid of the shortcut.

It is important to be aware of the line crossing by the shortcut.

However, the question that needs to be asked is:

Do I trust this?

It is:

What I don’t currently monitor anymore, because I believe it to be this?

Speak with a brand that you’ve been using for many years.

Ask it of the expert that you admire.

If you’re asked by an old friend to buy something you don’t recognize from the company that you trust, ask them when.

And ask it of AI.

If it’s no, the trust may be on point.

The answer is if it is something important, then the halo has begun to make you like the source more than that.

It has begun to think that it isn’t necessary to provide evidence.

This could be the biggest price tag for a halo.

We’re quite good at measuring the extent to which a halo makes people think.

We haven’t done a very good job of quantifying how much it makes them not ask questions anymore.

And maybe the strongest measure of a strong reputation is the number of people saying “yes”.

Whether they still feel comfortable asking:

How do we know?