An examination into the long-term characteristics of market share non-stationarity
The thesis tracks whether market share growth and decline remain stationary and how the brands grow and decline over a long period. It used big data of around 649 consumer package goods (CPG) categories and 3,899 brands that remained in the market from 2009 to 2019. The thesis provides marketing practitioners with many important insights. First, the findings highlight the importance of launching new brands in the low-competition categories, where brands do not have much difference in their market shares. Second, managers need to execute long-term marketing strategies to maintain their share growth by increasing the number of category buyers and avoiding investment in the categories that lose the size of their overall sales. Finally, the findings debunk the myths of the effectiveness of promotions and frequently changing the unit price by showing its inefficiency in growing a brand’s market share over a long period.
Do brands that grow advertise differently to those that do not?
Market share stationarity is the norm in established categories and developed markets with growth (or decline) clearly the exception. Nonetheless, growth targets remain common practice in business and marketing plans.
Advertising is a key scalable tool and one of the large budget items marketers have to help achieve growth. Yet there is limited generalisable evidence and knowledge to inform how much to spend on advertising and how to allocate budgets across media and time. The purpose of this study is to understand whether growing brands advertise differently to non-growing brands, with a focus specifically on advertising budgeting and media planning.
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Investigating the cross-category purchasing between brand extensions
Brand extensions occur when a brand launches a product in a different product category and is a way of capitalising upon successful brand names. Several studies have shown that users of a brand express intentions to purchase extensions at a higher rate than non-users. The problem with these results, however, is they have been developed using attitudinal measures, rather than behavioural ones. This thesis intends to bridge this literature gap by using behavioural data to analyse whether the buyers of a brand in one category purchase extensions at a higher rate than non-brand buyers.
A previous study by Mundt (2011) had a similar purpose, however the study held limitations, such as categorising brands by their corporate brand and category pairings analysed being the same category. This thesis aims to replicate and extend this study to increase the understanding and generalisability of these findings.
As brand extensions are said to positively impact choice of the brand, this thesis aims to understand whether this occurs in market.
The devil wears Prada…and Chanel…and Calvin Klein. Uncovering the patterns of luxury brand competition.
A brand’s survival ultimately rests on its ability to sell products. With other brands vying for a share of consumer spending, brands must be strategic about how they compete. Empirical research can help by uncovering regularities in buying behaviour and providing norms to guide decision-making.
What’s The Category Got to Do With It: Investigation of retailer performance at the category level in the UK market
This thesis replicates and extends the original research (Dhar et al. 2001) into another developed market, the United Kingdom, for a five-year period. It will assess whether the patterns found in the Untied States hold, and identify the conditions where they do not, contributing to the development of more robust understandings of category level performance.
Are luxury/premium products different? Do they share attributes and purchase patterns with non-luxury/non-premium products?
Luxury brands belong to one of the fastest-growing product categories with the highest profits. Most of the recent research of luxury/premium products has been conducted without describing or agreeing on the definition of the actual terms. Marketing and brand managers need to understand what attributes consumers associate with luxury/ premium products. The first objective is to understand what attributes consumers associate with luxury and premium products, and the price points to which consumers perceive these attributes to belong. The second objective is to establish whether actual consumers’ purchase patterns of luxury/premium products are similar to the well-known purchase patterns for non-luxury/non-premium products in the marketplace.
First time brand trial in consumer goods markets
While several studies have examined product innovation and adoption of new brands, there is limited knowledge on the first time trial of long-standing consumer goods’ brands. This thesis investigates trial behaviour of consumers who have never bought a particular brand within a given category.
Descriptive patterns in wine buying
This thesis explores buying patterns in the Australian retail wine market, a complex and highly fragmented product category. Brand alone provides a uni- dimensional picture. The biggest brands have small market shares making meaningful evaluation of market structure difficult. This research demonstrates what greater insights emerge when using product attributes such as variety, region of origin, country of origin, Australian state and $2 price tiers.
Do product variants appeal to different segments of buyers within a category?
Although brand is an important attribute for the choice of a particular product, other attributes such as pack-size and formula cannot be ignored (Fader and Hardie, 1996; Andrews and Manrai, 1999). Indeed, research has shown that there is higher loyalty towards product attributes rather than brands in the wine category (Jarvis et al., 2007). Therefore, despite the lack of evidence of market segmentation for competing brands as shown in recent research, market segmentation for different product variants might occur. This thesis therefore will address that issue by examining whether different product variants appeal to buyers with different demographic characteristics. The thesis examines the product variants (such as formula, pack-size, form, pack-type) of a range of brands in nine consumer goods categories. The thesis applies the cross- tabular analysis method for segmentation of product variants. It calculates and compares the market share of each variant within each demographic group.
Buying across price tiers in the Australian wine market
This masters thesis titled 'Buying across price tiers in the Australian wine market' explores if the duplication of purchase law (DoP) can be used to describe how consumers purchase across price tiers. The law has traditionally been used to describe how consumers buy across different brands in repeat purchase markets over time. This thesis builds on the generalisability of the DoP law by applying it to how consumers buy from different price tiers in a market where much price choice exists.