What’s in a name? Plenty for news outlets

SHAKESPEARE was wrong. He assured us that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. One reason that is such a beloved line is its comforting message that intrinsic quality, rather than external labels, is what really counts.

But recent research by a Harvard Business School professor suggests that, at least when it comes to the written word, labels matter quite a lot.

That is one of the conclusions of not-yet-published work by Bharat Anand, the Harvard professor, and Alexsander Rosinski, a former researcher there. The two wanted to figure out two things: whether brands influence our perceptions of quality and whether adjacent advertising does.