مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اثر انحصاری طبیعی در انجمن های تصویر برند (الزویر)

Consider the example of a consumer who hardly purchases soft drinks, but has been tasked with supplying some for a birthday party. Given their limited level of past experience, this consumer will most likely buy one of the most popular brands such as Coke or Pepsi, as opposed to less popular brands such as LA Ice Cola. Thanks to attracting the occasional ‘one-off’ purchases by consumers such as this party organiser, brands such as Coke and Pepsi gain and retain market share. That is, leading brands attract a disproportionate share of purchases from those consumers who are lighter users (buyers) of the category. This simple and logical mechanism is called the Natural Monopoly and is an empirical regularity discovered by McPhee (1963) in radio listening, subsequently detected and examined in buying behaviour (Ehrenberg et al., 2000, 2004). A handful of studies have examined the Natural Monopoly in different contexts, including: Elberse’s study (2008) on video rentals; Chrysochou and Krystallis’s (2010) work on wine; Lynn (2013) and Sjostrom et al.’s (2014) research on restaurants and food products, respectively; Scriven et al.’s (2015) paper on leisure activities; and Gruneklee et al.’s (2016) piece on social marketing. However, these studies did not explore the Natural Monopoly in relation to non-behavioural aspects of consumption. Additionally, in most instances it was simply detected alongside other empirical patterns such as the Double Jeopardy pattern and the Duplication of Purchase Law (Ehrenberg et al., 2000, 2004; Sharp et al., 2012); it was not the main focus of the study. Nonetheless, the Natural Monopoly yields explanatory power, especially regarding the strategic importance of light users (or buyers) of a certain category for the pursuit of growth and the improvement of market performance. In line with the above rationale, this study revisits the Natural Monopoly and extends its reach as an empirical marketing law by applying it to the analysis of brand image associations. Brand image associations capture the range of thoughts, ideas and perceptions that consumers associate with brands in their mind (Keller, 1993). This research demonstrates that it is possible to use the Natural Monopoly as a ‘tool’ to interpret the underlying ‘trade-off’ between associations that consumers hold in memory for a specific brand vs. other brands in the same category, given the same range of category cues or category entry points – i.e., purchase or consumption situations, core benefits etc. (Romaniuk and Sharp, 2016). In more detail, the present research draws upon the Natural Monopoly to address the following key research questions: Do popular brands monopolise most associations with category entry points? If so, how can brands that are already associated with most (or all) category entry points pursue growth, i.e. improve the chances of retrieval from memory in buying situations? To answer these questions, this study analyses three large data sets, covering multiple time-periods and six categories (including CPGs, services and ‘new’ digital offerings such as mobile applications). We use a combination of descriptive statistical analyses and regression techniques (repeated for all sets of data) to detect and interpret the Natural Monopoly pattern in brand image associations, focussing on the analysis of two metrics: mental market share, i.e. a brand’s percentage of associations out of the total associations for all brands in the category (derived from Romaniuk, 2013); and category association rate, i.e. the ratio between the overall number of associations for all brands in the category and the number of consumers who could retrieve the brand from memory (derived from Stocchi et al., 2016).