Perhaps it s not nice to pile on Apple right now, as it prepares to address the gadget world about its embarrassing antenna problems on the iPhone 4. Nonetheless, Apple s problems not just the antenna issue, but the broader issues of a locked-down application-approval system, an overtaxed 3G network, a phone blocked from using one of the most prevalent Web platforms might lead one to think a little bit about brands and how they affect our decisions in the marketplace.

Do brands blind us to a product s objective merits or demerits? How do we make a decision when choosing between brands? Why do we sometimes choose a product we like, for un-nameable reasons, over a product that objectively works better?

Perhaps an experiment about pens can t answer all of these questions, or entirely solve the mysteries of the deep attachments we form to brands like Apple or Coke or Starbucks. But a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, looking at how brand associations interact with product facts in our decision-making process, can at least shed a little light.

As you might suspect, it turns out the facts aren t always or perhaps even usually what drive our decisions.

In a series of experiments, marketing professors Melanie Dempsey, of Ryerson University, and Andrew A. Mitchell, of the University of Toronto, set out to answer the question of which would win out: positive or negative feelings about two brands or facts about those two brands.

Looking for a product that was almost entirely utilitarian that is, one where feelings should be pretty irrelevant and looking for a product with which a group of undergraduate subjects would be very well acquainted, they settled on the humble pen.

In the first experiment, subjects were exposed to two fictional brands. The purpose of this was to condition the participants to feel either positively or negatively about the two brands. This was done by showing the subjects hundreds of images, some of the brands, some of images, some of words, some of the brands paired with images or words. While the images appeared random, they were manipulated so that one brand was associated with positive images and words, and the other was associated with negative images and words.

The participants didn t notice that this was the case yet, it created the desired connection. Previous experiments have shown that it s actually rather easy to create an I like it, but I don t know why effect in consumers. The positive association is lodged in your brain, though you re probably completely unaware how it got there. It s what every marketer and brand manager dreams of achieving.

What happens to that subconscious positive brand association, however, when it runs up against facts about those brands? In the experiment, the brand with the positive association was given worse attributes, and the brand with the negative association was given better ones, in a series of ads that participants were asked to read. (No warranty versus a lifetime warranty; one mile of ink versus 1.5 miles of ink; available in two colors of ink versus available in seven colors of ink.)

Here s where things got strange. Some of the participants were asked to evaluate the products when reading and to use the information to form an opinion about the brands. Others were asked simply to rate whether the ads were easy to understand. In the first condition, where the subjects were explicitly told to pay attention to the content, they behaved as one might expect: They chose the pen with the better attributes, regardless of the positive or negative conditioning they d received previously.

But: If they weren t specifically instructed to form their opinions of the brands based on the facts, they overwhelmingly chose the worse brand of pen, the one that they d been conditioned to view positively. This, despite the fact that they did, according to follow-up questions, absorb the product information they were given.

In other words, even though they had the information to know which brand of pen was better, they chose based on subconscious, warm, fuzzy brand associations as opposed to cold, hard facts. What s more, this pattern held even in a second experiment, where participants were given extra incentive to choose rationally, being told ahead of time to make your choices carefully because at the end of the study you will be asked to justify each of your choices to a group of people including the experimenter.

Now, this doesn t solve the puzzle of the iPhone (not least because there are plenty of rational reasons to choose one phone over another, other than network speed and reception). But it does highlight one of the oddities of how our brains process the panoply of choices we re faced with every day in the marketplace. Unless we force our brains at gunpoint, they re often perfectly happy to go with the subconscious flow as opposed to doing the hard rowing of rational thought.