Household Brand Research Articles

Technical Note—Aggregating Individual Purchases to the Household Level

Household level panel data are the input for many types of marketing studies. An interesting, but until now unaddressed, question is what is the effect of aggregating individual members' purchases to the household level. Under “standard” assumptions the answer is unambiguous: the household brand switching pattern looks more zero order than the typical individual family member's behavior. When the standard assumptions are relaxed the overall spirit of the results do not change. These conclusions give comfort to those who use brand switching data to partition product categories. Those looking for variety-seeking behavior from household data are given some cause for concern—as well as reasons for reinterpreting previous studies.

Interproduct Household Loyalty to Brands

This article reports pairwise correlation coefficients between 38 grocery products based on two different measures of household brand purchasing behavior. The modest magnitude of these coefficients implies that situation-specific as opposed to general household characteristics are the best candidates for predicting brand buying behavior within products.

Household Correlates of "Brand Loyalty" for Grocery Products

TzE relevance of to the formulation of a profitable program of market segmentation has intrigued both practitioners and scholars alike ever since the publication of the pioneering work of Brown' and Cunningham2 in the early 1950's. Its usefulness as a basis for segmentation depends, in part, on the answers to the following questions: To what extent do brand-loyal customers constitute an identifiable market segment? Do they tend to have different rates of consumption for the product under study? Do they have different income levels? Different ethnic backgrounds? Different store shopping patterns? If differences such as these do exist, they would help manufacturers to better understand the process underlying the generation of brand loyalty and would provide a partial basis for the formutlation of their marketing programs. The study reported in this paper consists of an analysis of the relationship between characteristics such as these and household brand loyalty for forty-four grocery products. Since the time of Brown's and Cunningham's work, several studies have been published which have attempted to identify brand-loyal customers in terms of socioeconomic, demographic, personality, and/or selected consumption characteristics.3 With the exception of one study by Farley,4 none of these have been based on an explicit theory of the nature of the underlying process. Farley used Stigler's theory of the economics of information5 as a basis for developing hypotheses as to the characteristics of households that would tend to exhibit greater than average brand loyalty within a product class. He reasoned that the expected gain associated with searching (given that the brands in a product class are considered close substitutes) should be positively correlated with the amount purchased by the buyer. The primary reason for searching in this context would be to find lower prices. Thus, one *Associate professor of marketing, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania. t Doctoral candidate in marketing, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania.