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Every well trained manager knows about the “four P’s” of marketing. To make a sale, a company must offer the right product to meet customers’ needs, and at the right price. It has to be offered in a place they find convenient and, in order for them to know about it and how it can help them, it has to be promoted well. New research by my colleagues and me, however, suggests that another “P” is growing in importance. Customers also care who the parent of the product is. Provided with plenty of comparable alternatives, and facing plenty of discretionary purchases, they’ll choose to patronize the brand owned by the company they hold in higher esteem.

As one Chinese consumer we surveyed put it, “The company is like a parent to the product; and only good parents educate good kids.”

This is a new phenomenon. As recently as a decade ago, a marketer could safely assume the institutional parentage of even a well-known brand was unknown—and of little interest—to the buying public. Marlboro was Marlboro and Camel was Camel. Who knew which came from Philip Morris and which from R.J. Reynolds? Pre-Internet days, if you asked your neighbors who was the company behind your favorite smoke, they’d scratch their heads or just assume the brand name was the company. They’d be just as unlikely to have opinions, positive or negative, on those parent corporations’ reputations.

For all kinds of reasons, that has changed. People have become increasingly concerned with business’s impact on the world, and search engines like Google or Bing make it trivially easy to find out who makes a product and how, where they operate, who they have offended, and what causes they have supported. Social media makes it easy to learn more, and spread the word. Suddenly, a brand’s paternity is not only easy for customers to discover, it’s important to them to consider. And they have no troubl