دانلود رایگان مقاله اثر انحصاری طبیعی در انجمن های تصویر برند

Abstract

The Natural Monopoly is a robust empirical generalisation that describes the tendency for more popular brands to attract light users of the product category. This study shows that this pattern can also explain the underlying ‘trade-off’ between associations that consumers hold in memory for a specific brand vs. other brands, given the same range of category cues or category entry points (e.g., purchase or consumption situations, core benefits etc.). Specifically, the Natural Monopoly can be extended to explain that consumers with limited knowledge of brands are more likely to memorise associations primarily in relation to the most popular brands of the category, which ‘monopolise’ category entry points. This is confirmed with broadly consistent results across three data sets, multiple time-periods and a total of six categories (including CPGs, services and mobile applications). As such, this study significantly expands the generalisability of the Natural Monopoly empirical law by showcasing it as a ‘tool’ to extend knowledge on brand image associations. The results also yield important practical implications for growing a brand’s mental availability. For the most popular brands, the outcomes of this study highlight the relevance of reaching out to consumers with limited knowledge of brands within the same category; for the least popular brands, they indicate the importance of building associations with category entry points.

7. Conclusions and limitations

This research has revisited the Natural Monopoly, a marketing law explaining why light users of a certain offering (e.g., a product or service category, or a specific type of consumer behaviour) will be drawn to the most popular brands in that product class, and has showed that the same law can also explain an underlying ‘tradeoff’ in brand image associations. Specifically, through the analysis of multiple data sets, this study showed that consumers with limited knowledge of brands within a certain category tend to retrieve the most popular brands, because they somewhat ‘monopolise’ CEPs. Hence, brands that are already highly mentally available need to resort to reaching out to those consumers for growth. This exemplifies how the tradition of empirical marketing law continues to offer venues to advance understanding of many aspects of consumption, including in relation to the cognitive mechanisms that characterise how consumers process brands in memory. Nonetheless, as with any research, this work is not exempt from limitations. For instance, it covers a range of potential confounding factors (e.g., variation over time, variation across contexts differing in the inherent level of brand loyalty etc.), but omits to consider others. Above all, future works could consider high involvement contexts and/or industrial markets, whereby the number of brands available to consumers is somewhat more limited. Future research could also test whether popular brands with higher relative levels of mental availability do indeed grow faster than similarly popular brands with slightly lower levels of mental availability. Finally, in line with the existence of different consideration sets (see Romaniuk and Sharp, 2016), further replications of this work should deploy an experimental design to examine in more detail different sub-sets of CEPs, looking for more benchmarks with managerial relevance.