مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Marketing research has well documented observed patterns of relationships among key measures of brand performance (Ehrenberg, Uncles, and Goodhardt, 2004). In markets for fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), high market share brands have correspondingly higher levels of penetration (more customers) than brands with low market shares. Furthermore, brands with lower market shares are purchased less frequently and their buyers are correspondingly less loyal (Fader and Schmittlein, 1993). Thus, the small share brand has multiple shortcomings due to its size (McPhee, 1963). This phenomena, often identi- fied as Double Jeopardy (DJ), has been reported in more than 50 published studies (see Ehrenberg et al., 2004; Jung, Gruca, and Rego, 2010 for a listing).

Despite its long history, there remains a question about whether the observed relationships among brand performance measures meet the requirements of a “good” empirical generalization (Bass and Wind, 1995; Barwise, 1995). The most obvious shortcoming is in the formal measurement of the relationships between market share and other key brand performance metrics (e.g., penetration, purchase frequency, and share of requirements1 ). The existing literature documenting these relationships relies on researcher-identified patterns in the data. It does not utilize more formal and comprehensive meta-analytic methods typically used to generate empirical generalizations in marketing.

To bring additional rigor to research in this area, we quantify the relationships between market share and three key performance metrics (penetration, purchase frequency, share of requirements) using the Pearson correlation coefficient. Second, inter-category differences in the strength of these relationships are modeled using a number of category characteristics that moderate the relationship between market share and other metrics. The setting for this study is the U.S. grocery channel. Our data includes more than 400 FMCG categories.