Battling for consumer memory: Assessing brand exclusiveness and brand dominance from citation-list

Abstract

This article proposes two new indices and a new map to analyze a brand’s competitive position in consumer memory. It relies on each consumer’s brand citation-list. We view as beneficial mono-citations, when the brand is the only one cited by a consumer. We define “brand exclusiveness” as the share of mono-citations the brand gets among the mono-citations for all brands cited. Another index measures the “dominance” of one brand over another brand in memory. We offer a new map of memory competition that positions pairs of brands according to their association in memory and to the dominance of one brand over the other. We illustrate the possible contribution of these new indices and of this new competitive map, using the example of luxury watches. We analyze the convergent, discriminant and predictive validity of brand exclusiveness. We discuss avenues for future research suggested by these new concepts and associated empirical measures.