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Are food brands that carry light claims different?

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Abstract

Little is known about the market performance of brands that carry light claims (for example low fat, low sugar) in comparison to their regular counterparts. In order to fill this gap, we explore whether light brands perform similarly to regular brands in terms of (a) brand performance measures (BPMs), such as market share (MS) and penetration, (b) loyalty levels, and (c) customer sharing. We analyse three product categories (cola, flavoured carbonated beverages and margarine) using UK household panel data provided by Kantar. The results show that when considering standard BPMs (that is MS, penetration and purchase frequency), regular brands receive higher BPMs than light brands. However, when considering repeat purchase loyalty, light brands achieve greater levels of loyalty than their regular counterparts. Finally, light brands share their buyers more with each other than expected, suggesting the existence of market partitions, although these are not isolated as buyers of these brands still buy regular brands.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that Rungie (2003) developed another way to estimate the model in Microsoft Excel via maximum likelihood theory. This would require fitting the log of the gamma (Γ) function to the purchases made by each customer in each of the brands present in the category (Casini et al, 2009; Li et al, 2009; Corsi et al, 2011). This option should be viewed with favour by researchers, as, on top of the estimation of the category index, it allows the calculation of the polarisation index for each of the brands in the category, thus having a brand-specific loyalty value. The approach is identical to the estimation of the polarisation index via the DMD, but this time the bivariate version of the DMD is applied. This distribution, called the Bivariate Binomial Distribution (BBD), expresses the loyalty levels of consumers in the marginal choice between each brand and the other brands in the category (Corsi et al, 2011). If this is done, the analysis could focus on the deviations of loyalty for each brand from the average loyalty value for the category. However, in order to do this, one should have access to the purchases made by each individual in each of the brands present in the category. Unfortunately, the authors did not have access to this type of information, as Power View only allows the extraction of brand-specific BPMs (that is penetration and purchase frequency) and does not allow the extraction of individual-level purchases. Consequently, we used the only viable option open to us.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 10, Aarhus, 8000, Denmark

    Therese Sjostrom, Armando Maria Corsi, Carl Driesener & Polymeros Chrysochou

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  1. Therese Sjostrom
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  2. Armando Maria Corsi
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  3. Carl Driesener
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  4. Polymeros Chrysochou
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Sjostrom, T., Maria Corsi, A., Driesener, C. et al. Are food brands that carry light claims different?. J Brand Manag 21, 325–341 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2014.10

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