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AbstractMarketers who want to protect their brand's share or grow it need to know who to reach and nudge with advertising. This paper uses continuous household panel data for 55 leading, advertised brands in 12 CPG categories to quantify their target market over different time frames and conditions (market type, brand size and dynamism). Results demonstrate that the customer base (brand penetration) must swell dramatically over time to maintain, let alone grow, market share. For stable brands, penetration typically doubles from its level in one quarter to a year, then again from 1 to 5 years as brands continue to attract lighter buyers who underpin long run sales. Over 5 years, over a third of brand buyers are so light that they buy the brand just once, but such buyers are vital to sales and critical to growth. As well as quantifying the 5‐year target audience for brands across these conditions, we test the predictive accuracy of the NBD‐Dirichlet as a benchmark. The implications for advertising and media strategy are detailed. The long‐term lessons for targeting become clear—unless brands "target the market", they have adopted a counter growth strategy.

Advertising research has largely neglected to evaluate the relative effectiveness of the different forms of branding devices available to advertisers. Branding can be direct, through explicit use of brand names, or indirect, through use of (non-brand name) brand elements, such as logos, spokes-characters and slogans that are connected to the brand in consumers' memory. Advertisers often downplay brand names in favour of brand elements because the latter are seen as less intrusive and more creative. This experiment in three categories demonstrates that direct branding often produces higher brand recall than indirect branding without compromising advertising likeability. There is, however, a clear picture-superiority effect, whereby picture elements (logos, spokes-characters) consistently elicit higher brand recall than text elements (slogans). The findings highlight that advertisers need not be reluctant to call out the brand name for fear of losing attention due to an unappealing ad, because consumers do not appear to penalise advertising with direct branding, nor do they reward advertising with subtler indirect branding.

AbstractBrands share more of their customers with bigger competitors and fewer with smaller ones. However, there are occasional deviations to this predictable Duplication of Purchase (DoP) pattern. When two or more brands share excess customers because of functional or nonfunctional differences—it is called a partition. While past research using the NBD‐Dirichlet model demonstrates partitions in annual or shorter data, there is no empirical evidence for partition persistency over the longer term, although some other NBD‐Dirichlet deviations are known to persist over time. Examining expected partitions in 10 consumer goods categories in the United Kingdom, the authors show partitions overwhelmingly persist over 3 years. The findings contribute support to Dirichlet theory, especially on market stability, boundary conditions, and provide practical implications for portfolio management.

AbstractThe pace of online shopping revenue growth means it is important for retailers and manufacturers to understand how consumers behave online compared with their behaviour in brick and mortar stores. We conducted a study in which the detailed behaviour of 40 shoppers was screen recorded while they each undertook an online shopping 'trip'. The shopping trip comprised purchasing a basket of 12 commonly bought grocery categories at one of two major retailers. The shoppers were all inexperienced in online grocery shopping. Results show that online grocery shopping is fast, even for these consumers who were new to it – half of the online shoppers spent less than 10 seconds purchasing from a category. This result is very similar to that of past studies in physical stores. Indeed, half of all the 12 item‐shopping trips took less than 10 minutes. Also, most purchases were made from the first category page displayed in the retailer's online store. Shoppers also consistently used the default display options chosen by the retailers but used a combination of navigational tools to find their products. We conclude that online shoppers do not behave differently from those offline in terms of time spent or effort expended. Online shopping, in the grocery context at least, seems to primarily reflect a desire for time efficiency on the part of the shopper. In that regard, online shopping seems very similar to in‐store shopping. The study begins the job of documenting shopper behaviour into this new channel and provides practical knowledge for retailers and manufacturers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.