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Many studies have quantified the effects of TV ad spending or gross rating points on brand sales. Yet this effect is likely moderated by the different types of brand-related messages or cues (e.g., logo, brand attributes) embedded in the ads and by the ways (e.g., explicitly or implicitly) these cues are conveyed to TV audiences. The authors thus measure 17 cues often used within ads to build brand awareness (or salience) and brand image and investigate their influence on ad effectiveness. Technically, the study builds a dynamic model to quantify the effects of advertising on sales; builds a robust and interpretable (i.e., nonparametric and sparse) factor model that integrates correlated, left-censored branding cues; and then models the effects of advertising as a function of the factors identified by these cues. An analysis of 177 campaigns aired by 62 brands finds that salience cues (e.g., logo) and benefit and attribute messages moderate ad effectiveness. It also finds that explicit cues are more effective than implicit ones; nonetheless, the primary drivers of ad effectiveness are visual salience cues: the duration and frequency with which the logo and the duration with which the product are displayed. The study can thus suggest ways brand and ad agency managers can improve the effects of creative ad content on sales.

Native advertising is a type of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. In practice, the choice between display and in-feed native advertising presents brand advertisers and online news publishers with conflicting objectives. Advertisers face a trade-off between ad clicks and brand recognition, whereas publishers need to strike a balance between ad clicks and the platform’s trustworthiness. For policy makers, concerns that native advertising confuses customers prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue guidelines for disclosing native ads. This research aims to understand how consumers respond to native ads versus display ads and to different styles of native ad disclosures, using randomized online and field experiments combining behavioral clickstream, eye movement, and survey response data. The results show that when the position of an ad on a news page is controlled for, a native ad generates a higher click-through rate because it better resembles the surrounding editorial content. However, a display ad leads to more visual attention, brand recognition, and trustworthiness for the website than a native ad.

Does “liking” a brand on Facebook cause a person to view it more favorably? Or is “liking” simply a symptom of being fond of a brand? The authors disentangle these possibilities and find evidence for the latter: brand attitudes and purchasing are predicted by consumers' preexisting fondness for brands, and these are the same regardless of when and whether consumers “like” brands on social media. In addition, we explore possible second-order effects by examining whether “liking” brands might cause consumers' friends to view that brand more favorably. When consumers see that a friend has “liked” a brand, they are less likely to buy the brand relative to when they learn that a friend genuinely likes the brand in the offline sense, which is a more meaningful social endorsement. Taken together, five experiments and two meta-analyses (N > 14,000) suggest that turning “liking” into improved brand attitudes and increased purchasing by consumers and their friends may require more than just the click of a button.

The extent to which a brand's individual products (relative to competing products) are available to consumers for purchase in a retail store can critically affect the brand's overall performance. However, store-level product availability information is lost in aggregate market-level data sets and has been ignored by extant demand studies in general, which can create the risk of misinformed managerial decision making. In this research, the authors propose a unique methodology to enable manufacturers to infer retailers’ joint stocking probability of products from aggregate data and, thus, enable consumers’ choices to be contingent on the assortment of products available in retail stores. The application of the proposed framework in the context of an emerging market results in unbiased demand parameter estimates, a significantly better model fit, and richer managerial insights (compared with conventional approaches) pertaining to how brand performance is affected by the (1) dynamics of retailers’ stocking preferences, (2) assortment of products that retailers are more (vs. less) likely to jointly stock, and (3) cannibalization of retailers’ shelf space resulting from product line extensions.

In brand imitation lawsuits, the primary focus is on demonstrating harm as it relates to brand confusion. The authors' premise is that such a narrow focus does not capture the complete impact of brand imitation. They offer a broader, theory-based perspective of harm by proposing that brand imitation affects both brand consideration and preference in the consumer choice process. The authors establish a formal nexus between brand consideration and the legal doctrine “initial interest confusion.” Using choice experiments and statistical modeling, they show that brand imitation harms the imitated brand even after controlling for brand confusion. Moreover, brand imitation harms not only the imitated brand but also other national brands in the category that are not being imitated. To quantify brand consideration and preference harm in financial terms, the authors propose two metrics: choice share shift and share-equalizing price cut. The results show that brand imitation harms the national brand more when the imitating brand is not associated with a well-known retailer and that brand imitation harm extends beyond brand confusion. The proposed framework provides both legal and managerial guidance.

New brand extensions can push a brand outside its typical boundaries. In this article, the authors argue that people's acceptance of such extensions depends on their feelings of control. Across several studies, the authors demonstrate that when feelings of personal control are low, consumers and managers seek greater structure in brands and thus reject brand extensions that do not seem to fit well with the parent brand. The authors also identify important boundary conditions that illustrate when consumers are most likely to punish a brand for poor-fitting brand extensions and how the effect can be mitigated.

Three laboratory experiments explore how alternative brand name structures (i.e., family branded or subbranded) and varying degrees of category similarity (i.e., similar or dissimilar) influence extension evaluations and parent brand dilution. The results indicate that subbranded extensions (e.g., Quencher by Tropicana cola) evoke a slower, more thoughtful subtyping processing strategy than family branded extensions (e.g., Tropicana cola), which evoke a faster, category-based processing strategy. As a result, category similarity affects extension evaluations when the extension is family branded but not when it is subbranded. In addition, dilution effects are only evident when consumers have a negative experience with a similar family branded extension. Subbranding thus offers two key benefits to marketers: It both enhances extension evaluations and protects the parent brand from any unwanted negative feedback.

The authors show how to use microlevel survey data from a tracking study on brand awareness in conjunction with data on sales and advertising expenditures to improve the specification, estimation, and interpretation of aggregate discrete choice models of demand. In a departure from the commonly made full information assumption, they incorporate limited information in the form of choice sets to reflect that consumers may not be aware of all available brands at purchase time. They find that both the estimated brand constants and the price coefficient are biased downward when consumer heterogeneity in choice sets is ignored. These biased estimates can lead firms to make costly price-setting mistakes. In addition, the tracking data enable the authors to identify separately two processes by which advertising influences market shares. They find that advertising has a direct effect on brand awareness (inclusion in choice set) in addition to its effect on consumer preferences (increase in utility). This improved understanding of how advertising works enhances researchers’ ability to make policy recommendations.

The authors examine the dynamic effects of category- and brand-level advertising for a new pharmaceutical in a market in which regulations require that the content of these two types of advertising be mutually exclusive. Specifically, category, or generic, messages should communicate information only about the disease without promoting any brand, whereas brand-level messages should be void of any therapeutic information. This brings up two questions of great managerial importance: Which type of message is generally more effective (category or brand level), and when is one type more effective than the other? The authors pursue these questions by analyzing the effects of advertising on new and refill prescriptions through the use of an augmented Kalman filter with continuous state and discrete observations. The findings suggest the presence of complex dynamics for both types of regulation-induced advertising messages. In general, brand advertising is more effective, especially after competitive entry. Extensive validation tests confirm the superiority of the modeling approach. The authors discuss implications for managers and regulators.

Prior research on attention shifts to advertisements has focused primarily on demonstrating how perceptual features can shift attention to advertisements. In this article, the authors demonstrate that certain semantic characteristics of nonfocal advertising elements may similarly attract attention when consumers are focused on a primary task elsewhere in the visual field. In three experiments, the authors investigate how orienting attention responses to highly emotional advertising elements influence ad and brand awareness in cluttered environments. Specifically, they demonstrate that preattentive processing of the semantic information in nonfocal ad headlines can elicit orienting attention responses that result in predictable increases in ad and brand awareness.

The majority of brand extensions reportedly fail, suggesting the need for methodologies that allow for better strategic prediction of categories into which a brand should extend or license. Prior literature suggests that brand extensions are likely to be more successful if a brand extends into another category into which its existing brand associations and imagery “fit” better and if the extending brand is “atypical” (if it possesses associations and imagery that are broad and abstract rather than tied too closely to the brand's original product category). The authors develop a methodology in this study to estimate brand and category personality structures, using a Bayesian factor model that separates the two by means of brand-level and category-level random effects. This methodology leads to measures of a brand's fit and atypicality. The authors illustrate and validate the model on two nationally representative data sets on brand personalities in three categories (jeans, magazines, and cars) and investigate the brand extension and licensing implications of the results obtained with the model.

This research demonstrates that consumers’ desire for counterfeit luxury brands hinges on the social motivations (i.e., to express themselves and/or to fit in) underlying their luxury brand preferences. In particular, the authors show that both consumers’ preferences for a counterfeit brand and the subsequent negative change in their preferences for the real brand are greater when their luxury brand attitudes serve a social-adjustive rather than a value-expressive function. In addition, consumers’ moral beliefs about counterfeit consumption affect their counterfeit brand preferences only when their luxury brand attitudes serve a value-expressive function. Finally, the authors demonstrate that the social functions served by consumers’ luxury brand attitudes can be influenced by elements of the marketing mix (e.g., product design, advertising), thus enabling marketers to curb the demand for counterfeit brands through specific marketing-mix actions.

International audience; Brand engagement in self-concept (BESC) is a generalized view of brands in relation to the self, with consumers varying in their tendency to include important brands as part of their self-concepts. The authors develop an eight-item scale to measure BESC and demonstrate that it captures a consumer's general engagement with brands. This scale successfully predicts consumers' differential attention to, memory of, and preference for their favorite brands. Brand engagement in self-concept is also related to differential brand loyalty, with high-BESC consumers being less price and time sensitive regarding their favorite brands than low-BESC consumers. The authors discuss the usefulness of this construct for marketing research.

Competitive advertising interference can occur when viewers of advertising for a focal brand are also exposed to advertising messages for competing brands within a short period (e.g., one week for television advertising). Although competitive advertising interference has been shown to reduce advertising recall and recognition and brand evaluation measures, no studies have examined its impact on brand sales. In this research, the authors use a market response model of sales for two grocery categories for a large grocery chain in the Chicago area to study the extent to which competitive advertising interference influences sales. The model enables the authors to capture the “pure” own-brand advertising elasticities that would arise if there were no competitive interference. The results show that competitive interference effects on sales are strong. When one or more competing brands advertise in the same week as the focal brand, the advertising elasticity diminishes for the focal brand. The decrease depends on the number of competing brands advertising in a particular week and their total advertising volume. The authors find that having one more competitor advertise is often more harmful to a focal brand's advertising effectiveness than if the current number of advertising brands increase their total advertising volume.

Promotion-induced consumer stockpiling has a negative impact on manufacturers because it moves forward in time brand sales that would have occurred later at full margin. However, the resultant increase in consumer inventory has two potential benefits: increased category consumption and preemptive brand switches (the additional inventory of the promoted brand preempts the consumer's purchase of a competing brand in the future). Furthermore, there is a potential impact on repeat purchases of the stockpiled brand after the promotion. In this article, the authors present a model and simulation-based method to measure the benefits and costs of stockpiling and assess their relative magnitudes. They find that the benefits are substantial, but consumption appears to be the most important, followed by preemptive switching and then an increase in repeat purchases. These benefits easily offset the negative aspect of consumer stockpiling—namely, purchase acceleration by loyal customers who would have bought the brand at regular price at a later date.

Understanding brand equity involves identifying the network of strong, favorable, and unique brand associations in memory. This article introduces a methodology, Brand Concept Maps, for eliciting brand association networks (maps) from consumers and aggregating individual maps into a consensus map of the brand. Consensus brand maps include the core brand associations that define the brand's image and show which brand associations are linked directly to the brand, which associations are linked indirectly to the brand, and which associations are grouped together. Two studies illustrate the Brand Concept Maps methodology and provide evidence of its reliability and validity.

The authors present the results of two studies that show how consumers' evaluations of an advertised product can be influenced by the compatibility or conflict between the regulatory goals (promotion or prevention) addressed by the product and prior advertising of related products. Participants across both studies were exposed sequentially to the advertising of two products (prime and target), and they demonstrated a regulatory goal fluency effect in their evaluations of the target brand. When the regulatory goal serviced by the target matched (conflicted with) the regulatory goal serviced by the prime, participants indicated higher (lower) purchase intent (Experiment 1) and more favorable evaluations of the target brand (Experiment 2). These effects were not accounted for by differences in participants' involvement or affective state across the conditions. Instead, mediation analyses show that participants' ease of processing the target advertisement underlies the effect of goal compatibility on brand evaluation.

In this article, the author investigates the impact of a brand extension's success versus failure on customer evaluation of brand counter-extensions. A counterextension is a brand extension that is launched into Category A by Brand 2 that belongs to Category B in a reciprocal direction to a launch of a previous extension into Category B by Brand 1 that belongs to Category A. The results from five studies show that customers evaluate a counterextension more favorably when the preceding extension is a success rather than a failure. Furthermore, the evaluation of the counterextension is superior if it is launched by a major brand, especially if the previous successful extension was also launched by a major brand. Finally, a successful extension indirectly dilutes a brand and results in a greater loss in choice share to a counterextension than does a failed extension. The key findings generalize to a sequence of extensions across more than one intercategory boundary.

Brands increasingly introduce products with attributes that fail to provide consumers with meaningful benefits (i.e., trivial attributes). The authors present two experiments that examine the effect of brand equity on consumer valuation of such trivial attributes and the reciprocal effect that such a strategy may have on brand equity. The results show that both high and low equity brands benefit from offering an attractive trivial attribute in the absence of a disclosure of its true value. However, prechoice disclosure of an attribute's triviality heightens the role of the brand and context cues. Competing low equity brands benefit by sharing the trivial attribute with a higher equity brand, whereas competing high equity brands benefit from uniquely offering a trivial attribute. Postchoice revelation that an attribute is trivial hurts the subsequent ability of a low but not a high equity brand to differentiate in a new product category, particularly among subjects who had previously chosen the target brand. For insights on brand dilution, the authors also examine consumer attributions regarding marketer intent for offering a trivial attribute.

Although brand ratings capture the favorability of brand associations, they often do not enable marketing managers to disentangle brand-specific associations from other effects. In this article, the authors present a decompositional model for analyzing brand ratings that addresses this nagging problem and provide insights for understanding the sources of brand equity. Starting with consumers' perceived level of a brand on an attribute, the authors decompose the rating into two components: brand-specific associations and general brand impressions. Brand-specific associations refer to features, attributes, or benefits that consumers link to a brand and that differentiate it from the competition. General brand impressions refer to general impressions about the brand that are based on a more holistic view of the brand. In this article, the authors focus on two principal issues: (1) How can the sources of bias that may be present in brand ratings be disentangled? and (2) Do these putatively biasing effects, if present, have any managerial implications for brand equity? The authors demonstrate the properties and advantages of the model in the context of three empirical applications.

Spillover refers to the extent to which a message influences beliefs related to attributes that are not contained in the message. The authors find that when consumers are not familiar with a brand, negative information spills over to attributes that are associated with the target attribute but not mentioned in the message. However, positive information does not. When consumers like the brand, a spillover occurs for the positive information as well. When consumers are committed to the brand, the spillover of negative information is minimized, but positive information spills over more freely to other associated but unmentioned attributes.

The authors assess the extent to which brand attitude, a key component of brand equity, has value relevance—that is, helps predict future earnings and thus firm value—in high-technology markets. Using data for firms in the computer industries, the authors find that changes in brand attitude are associated contemporaneously with stock return and lead accounting financial performance. The study also provides insights into the drivers of brand attitude. The authors find that both product attributes and peripheral cues shape brand attitudes in high-technology markets.

The findings of prior research suggest that a brand's extendibility is constrained by the degree of perceived fit between the brand and extension product categories. However, there are many examples of brands that have been extended successfully into “perceptually distant” domains. Drawing on theories of consumer information processing and product adoption, the authors identify three background traits of prior work that may help explain the discrepancy between prior research and marketplace observation: (1) limited extension information, (2) failure to account for consumers' new product adoption tendencies (i.e., earlier versus later), and (3) single exposure to proposed extensions. In this study, the authors find that the effects of fit disappear when attribute information is added to extension stimuli and are applicable only for later product adopters. The authors also find that perceived fit increases with greater exposure to an extension. Beyond implications for brand extension research, this study underscores the need to recognize that certain research design factors related to external validity, which are often assumed irrelevant, can alter what is held to be true.

The authors examine how brand preferences and response to marketing activity evolve for consumers new to a market. They develop a theoretical framework that begins with a consumer's first-ever purchase in a product category and describes subsequent purchases as components of sequential purchasing stages. The theory is based on the notion that choices made by consumers new to a market are driven by two competing forces: consumers' desire to collect information about alternatives and their aversion to trying risky ones. These forces give rise to three stages of purchasing: an information collection stage that focuses initially on low-risk, big brand names; a stage in which information collection continues but is extended to lesser-known brands; and a stage of information consolidation leading to preference for the brands that provide the greatest utility. The authors use a logit-mixture model with time-varying parameters to capture the choice dynamics of different consumer segments. The results show the importance of accounting for product experience and learning when studying the dynamic choice processes of consumers new to a market. Insights from this study can help marketers tailor their marketing activities as consumers gain purchasing experience.

The authors study brand-share dynamics among competing brands in new repeat-purchase categories. In such new categories, market shares are strongly affected by retailer distribution decisions. Because a retailer that considers a brand for distribution can take into account the prior performance of that brand with other retailers, the success of a manufacturer in obtaining distribution can depend positively on its brand's market share to date. This creates positive feedback between a brand's market share and its distribution over the growth stage of the category. Temporary positive feedback, along with the way manufacturers influence their brand's market share and distribution, is hypothesized to drive the emergence of the market structure. The authors model this feedback to quantify the evolution of a brand's coupled market share and distribution. Empirical results using data from the U.S. ready-to-drink tea category suggest that positive feedback between market share and distribution exists in the early growth stage of the category. Therefore, early in the life of the new category small short-term changes in market share or distribution may generate larger long-term changes in market share and distribution. Later, such momentum appears absent. In this context, the authors discuss how a late entrant fails to capture a sizeable share of the market.

Commercial market research firms provide information on advertising variables of interest, such as brand awareness or gross rating points, that are likely to contain measurement errors. This unreliability of measured variables induces bias in the estimated parameters of dynamic models of advertising. Consequently, advertisers either under- or overspend on advertising to maintain a desired level of brand awareness. Monte Carlo studies show that the magnitude of bias can be serious when conventional estimation methods, such as ordinary least squares and errors in variables, are employed to obtain parameter estimates. Therefore, the authors have developed two new approaches that either reduce or eliminate parameter bias. Using these methods, advertisers can determine an unbiased optimal advertising budget, even if advertising variables are measured with error. The application of these methods to estimate the extent of measurement noise in empirical advertising data is illustrated.

The authors examine the long-term effects of promotion and advertising on consumers’ brand choice behavior. They use 8 1/4 years of panel data for a frequently purchased packaged good to address two questions: (1) Do consumers’ responses to marketing mix variables, such as price, change over a long period of time? (2) If yes, are these changes associated with changes in manufacturers’ advertising and retailers’ promotional policies? Using these results, the authors draw implications for manufacturers’ pricing, advertising, and promotion policies. The authors use a two-stage approach, which permits them to assess the medium-term (quarterly) effects of advertising and promotion as well as their long-term (i.e., over an infinite horizon) effects. Their results are consistent with the hypotheses that consumers become more price and promotion sensitive over time because of reduced advertising and increased promotions.

Companies often introduce new product features to differentiate their brands and gain a competitive advantage. The authors investigate factors that moderate the impact of a new feature on brand choice. Building on two principles, multiattribute diminishing sensitivity and performance uncertainty, they propose that the characteristics of the products to which new features are added are important determinants of the impact of these features on sales and market share. Specifically, in six studies, they show that a new feature adds greater value and increases the choice share of a brand more when the brand (1) has relatively inferior existing features, (2) is associated with lower (perceived) quality, (3) has a higher price, and (4) is both high-priced and high-quality. The results also suggest that the addition of a new feature reduces buyers’ price sensitivity for low-quality, but not for high-quality, brands and that multiattribute diminishing sensitivity is a more important moderator of the effect of new features than performance uncertainty. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

The authors develop an approach to reveal segmentation in response to marketing variables at a brand-level perspective. In the proposed procedure, response segmentation is analyzed separately for each brand instead of jointly across all brands. This yields a segmentation picture oriented toward the potential targeting objectives of the brand manager. Using the multinomial logit and probabilistic mixture models, the procedure first calibrates consumer response in the brand choice decision. Individual-level measures of response for a given marketing variable (e.g., price) are then computed, and brand-level segments are obtained by clustering brand-specific response. Using scanner panel data, the approach is applied to price response segmentation for brands that compete in the ground coffee category. The results illustrate a series of implications for brand strategy, particularly the potential for targeting marketing activity to different response segments.

The authors examine the history of brand management by tracing its development in the context of the marketing environment from 1870 to the present. They develop six theses regarding the evolution of brand management and its implications and substantiate them utilizing a historical approach. They demonstrate that the brand manager system originated well after the leadership of branded products was established, it was adopted following a conventional adoption curve pattern, and it has proven quite adaptable to differing firm and marketing environments over the past several decades. They then evaluate its likely fate in today's rapidly changing environment.

Using a model of consumer variety-seeking, the authors study the long-term market share implications of changes in variety-seeking intensity, brand preferences, and pairwise similarities between brands. Those analytically derived guidelines are examined in three-brand and five-brand markets through simulation. The least preferred brand is found generally to gain market share as variety-seeking intensifies whereas the most preferred brand tends to lose share. If two brands are perceived as having become more similar without a change in overall preferences, the repositioned brands are likely to lose market share while uninvolved brands gain share. If two brands are perceived as having become more similar in a way that increases overall preference for those repositioned brands, they should gain market share while uninvolved brands lose it. A behavioral experiment provides preliminary empirical support for some of the findings.

Three measures of consumers’ beliefs about different attributes of competitive brands of packaged goods—free choice, scaling, and ranking—are found to place the brands in the same relative positions on each attribute dimension. In addition, gradients by the recency or frequency of claimed brand usage that have been observed previously in free-choice belief data now are found also in the scaling and ranking data.

The authors examine the link between advertising and price effects and propose that this relationship depends on the specific advertising positioning strategy employed by an advertiser. The authors note that advertising has different goals, depending on the competitive context of the brand, with some advertisers positioned to differentiate between brands and others positioned to narrow the perceived difference between brands. The authors identify specific types of nonprice advertising positioning that increase brand equity and category price sensitivity, those that decrease both, and those that increase brand equity while increasing category price sensitivity. The hypotheses are tested in two experiments across different product categories. The results imply that tests of advertising effectiveness must extend beyond brand attitudinal measures.

The authors examine the growing and pervasive phenomenon of brand alliances as they affect consumers’ brand attitudes. The results of the main study (n = 350) and two replication studies (n = 150, n = 210) together demonstrate that (1) consumer attitudes toward the brand alliance influence subsequent impressions of each partner's brand (i.e., “spillover” effects), (2) brand familiarity moderates the strength of relations between constructs in a manner consistent with information integration and attitude accessibility theories, and (3) each partner brand is not necessarily affected equally by its participation in a particular alliance. These results represent a first, necessary step in understanding why and how a brand could be affected by “the company it keeps” in its brand alliance relationships.

Recent research has identified two factors that influence consumer perceptions of a brand extension: brand affect and the similarity between the original and extension product categories. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to other associations specific to the brand itself. The authors perform three experiments to explore the relative importance of these associations. The experiments reveal that brand-specific associations may dominate the effects of brand affect and category similarity, particularly when consumer knowledge of the brands is high. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for managerial decision making and the process by which consumers evaluate brand extensions.

A growing number of brands are becoming associated with a portfolio of different product categories. Although concerns have been raised that adding products to a brand may weaken it, there is a paucity of research exploring the effects of brand portfolio characteristics on brand strength. Using two laboratory experiments and a survey, the authors examine the effects of several brand portfolio characteristics on consumers’ confidence in and favorability of their evaluations of subsequent brand extensions. The experiment-based findings reveal a positive relationship between the number of products affiliated with a brand and consumers’ confidence in and favorability of their evaluations of extension quality. These results were not replicated in the survey. However, in both methods, the authors found that as portfolio quality variance decreases, a positive relationship between number of products affiliated with a brand and consumers’ confidence in their extension evaluations emerges. Implications of these and other findings for both the theory and practice of brand management are discussed.

The authors develop a new survey-based method for measuring and understanding a brand's equity in a product category and evaluating the equity of the brand's extension into a different but related product category. It uses a customer-based definition of brand equity as the added value endowed by the brand to the product as perceived by a consumer. It measures brand equity as the difference between an individual consumer's overall brand preference and his or her brand preference on the basis of objectively measured product attribute levels. To understand the sources of brand equity, the approach divides brand equity into attribute-based and nonattribute-based components. The method provides the market share premium and the price premium attributable to brand equity. The survey-based results from applying the method to the toothpaste and mouthwash categories show that the proposed approach has good reliability, convergent validity, and predictive validity.

The authors examine switching and repeat purchase effects of advertising in mature, frequently purchased product categories. They draw on consumer behavior theories of framing and usage dominance to formulate a logit choice model for measuring these effects. They estimate the model using single-source scanner data. Their results suggest that advertising induces brand switching but does not affect the repeat purchase rates of consumers who have just purchased the brand, a result consistent with usage dominance rather than framing. They find the switching influence to be largely confined between the current and previous purchase occasions. They illustrate the magnitude of this effect and explore potential profitability.

The authors determine the multiple effects of retail promotions on brand loyal and brand switching segments of consumers. Segments are determined by an iterative Bayesian procedure. The variations in within-segment brand shares within a store are related to promotional variables by a logit model estimated by nonlinear least squares. Store share is modeled as a function of store attractiveness, a summary measure of the store's promotional activity on the multiple brands. Finally, category volume is related to overall product category attractiveness in a model that includes both current and lagged effects. The research approach is applied to the IRI ground coffee data. Results include: (1) the market can be characterized by brand loyal segments, each of which buys mostly their favorite brand, and switching segments, each of which switches mainly among different brands of the same type (e.g., drip, percolator), (2) promotional variables have significant effects on within-segment market shares, the effects being different across segments, (3) store share is related significantly to promotional attractiveness of a store, (4) the overall promotional attractiveness of the product category has significant current and lagged effects on category volume, and (5) the lagged effects resulting from consumer purchase acceleration and stockup last longer for brand loyal segments than for switching segments.

The authors report a study of the effects of price, brand, and store information on buyers’ perceptions of product quality and value, as well as their willingness to buy. Hypotheses are derived from a conceptual model positing the effects of extrinsic cues (price, brand name, and store name) on buyers’ perceptions and purchase intentions. Moreover, the design of the experiment allows additional analyses on the relative differential effects of price, brand name, and store name on the three dependent variables. Results indicate that price had a positive effect on perceived quality, but a negative effect on perceived value and willingness to buy. Favorable brand and store information positively influenced perceptions of quality and value, and subjects’ willingness to buy. The major findings are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.

The authors develop, calibrate, and test a disaggregate model of customer brand choice with customers’ price expectations as the mediating construct. They use a two-stage modeling procedure. The first stage is the determination of how expected prices are formed. In the second stage, brand choice is assumed to depend on the brand's retail price and whether or not that price compares favorably with the brand's expected price. The authors also test the hypothesis of symmetry in customer response to positive deviations (“losses”) and negative deviations (“gains”) of the retail price from the expected price. Analysis of scanner-panel data in the coffee market reveals that the brand choice model in which customers are assumed to respond to retail prices by comparing them with the corresponding expected prices provides a significantly better fit than a traditional brand choice model. Consistent with prospect theory, customers are found to react more strongly to price losses than to price gains. Results from the calibration of the expected price model indicate that expected price is not only dependent on past prices, but is also affected by the frequency with which a brand is promoted, economic conditions, customer characteristics, and the type of store shopped.

Information processing theory and findings on advertising response suggest a nonlinear response to repetitive ad exposure, mediated by brand loyalty. The response can occur in either or both of the hypothesized stages of purchase: brand choice and quantity choice. A tobit-type analysis of scanner purchases (with TV exposures) of a mature product category appears to support these hypotheses. The effect of advertising is generally nonlinear and its impact on volume purchased is mediated by brand loyalty. Advertising seems to reinforce preference for current brands rather than stimulate brand switching. However, features, displays, and especially price have a stronger impact on response than does advertising. The effect of brand loyalty dominates that of the other variables.

Fishbein's attitude theory posits that beliefs are the only mediators of attitude formation and change. The validity of this proposition for consumers’ beliefs about product attributes and brand attitudes was exmained in the context of an advertising effects study. To manipulate product attribute beliefs and to create settings in which other mediation processes might occur, the authors exposed subjects to simple advertisements that contained either a verbal claim or visual information. Level of repetition also was varied. As expected, product attribute beliefs mediated attitude formation. However, another variable, termed attitude toward the advertisement, also mediated brand attitudes and purchase intentions. The authors discuss alternative explanations for the results and offer suggestions for future research.

The results of an experiment examining the use of attitude toward the ad and brand-related beliefs in brand attitude formation under two different processing “sets”—brand evaluation and nonbrand evaluation—are reported. Findings suggest that attitude toward the advertisement affects attitude toward the advertised brand as much under a brand evaluation set as under a nonbrand evaluation set.

Brand loyalty is first distinguished from simple repeat purchasing behavior and then conceptually defined in terms of six necessary and collectively sufficient conditions. An experiment designed to test this conceptualization provided strong empirical support for the distinction as conceptualized.

This study attempted to determine the feasibility of quantitatively measuring consumers’ prior brand information. A measurement procedure based on the Bayesian concept of a prior distribution is presented, and its use by a sample of husband-wife dyads is discussed.

A measure of brand acceptance involves a refinement of the usual stochastic model market prediction. Using this measure, the effect of consumer promotions and purchasing habits on brand acceptance is investigated and a brand health indicator is developed.

Several estimation procedures are outlined for testing the common assumption that the distributions of purchase probabilities for a brand are independent of product class purchase frequency. Empirical data for 15 brands in three product classes were used for testing. The results indicate an important departure from independence for many brands. A frequency dependent Dirichlet distribution is proposed and appears to provide an improved description of how purchase probabilities are related to product class purchase frequency.

Perceived risk is conceptualized in terms of expected negative utility associated with automobile brand preferences. Empirical evidence supports the notion that importance of loss is more useful as a segmentation variable than as a component in a multiplicative model. The findings also Indicate that probability of loss may operate at the handled risk level and importance of loss at the inherent risk level.