The owner's edge: Brand ownership influences causal maps

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Abstract

Understanding the coherence between the attributes of a brand is a key asset for marketers managing brand equity. This study proposes consumer causal maps as a powerful instrument to achieve this purpose. These maps shed light on how different consumer groups think about the brand. Compared to non-owners, brand owners have been able to develop more expertise regarding the specific brand, which leads them to have more extensive causal maps. An exception occurs for the category leader, for which owners and non-owners have equally extensive maps. The surprising finding of this study is that the leading brand seems to encompass the ingredients for the causal maps of the other brands in the category. The results highlight how management should address owners and non-owners differently, in particular if a brand is far from category leadership.

Introduction

To achieve a favorable position in consumers' minds, brands distinguish themselves on attributes that are relevant to their customers or target groups. Marketers should not address brand attributes in isolation but rather look at the entire network of attributes (Keller, 2003, John et al., 2006). This helps them to create a coherent set of brand attributes that positively differentiates a brand from its competitors. To some extent, marketers can manage consumer perceptions of a brand's attributes and their interrelations. However, consumers continuously interact with the brand and reflect on it. Insight into consumer perceptions of the networks of brand attributes is therefore of utmost importance. Understanding the pattern of relations between associations helps marketers come to grips with and capitalize upon their brand equity (Keller, 2003).

Cognitive maps form a key instrument for this purpose. They help managers gain insight into how brand associations imply others. Such maps not only convey important brand associations (like the more traditional associative networks maps — cf. John et al., 2006), but also show how associations are connected with each other. Murphy and Medin (1985) argue that connections between elements of a belief structure often constitute causal relations. Causal accounts are particularly compelling as explanations (Keil, 2006). The vast majority of humans' everyday explanations involve notions of cause and effect, and when an explanation contains both causal and non-causal elements, the causal ones tend to dominate patterns of judgment (Murphy and Medin, 1985, Keil, 2006). Causal maps are efficient means of organizing and understanding consumer worlds (Anderson et al., 1980, Chater and Oaksford, 2006), and thus offer a more focused instrument than general associational maps.

Cognitive maps, thus, offer particularly useful insight to marketers. They are helpful in understanding how consumers think, and in identifying consumer core associations. Centrality in such a structure points to the features that are most pivotal to the overall brand image (Henderson, Iacobucci and Calder, 1998). These most essential features drive brand image (John et al., 2006), and play a crucial role in creating and maintaining brand equity (De Chernatony, 2001). Causal maps show how brand features depend upon each other, and point to those features that make the brand what it is — in other words, its essence (Van Rekom, Jacobs and Verlegh, 2006). Unfortunately, methods for producing brand maps have been slow to emerge (John et al., 2006). The dominant stream of research still focuses on associative networks (Loken, 2006). Causal brand maps are only a recent phenomenon (see Van Rekom et al., 2006), which suggests that scholars and practitioners have been underutilizing a potentially very insightful research instrument. The current study contributes to this emerging literature by being the first to compare causal maps for multiple brands in a category. In addition, this study compares causal maps of brand owners to those of non-owners, which is the basis for important consumer insights, as well as examining the role of consumer characteristics (i.e., brand ownership) in determining these maps.

Brand ownership affects consumers' knowledge and understanding of a brand. Using the brand allows consumers to learn about it, and develop a deeper understanding of the relationships among a brand's attributes (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987). The main question of this study is how brand ownership affects causal maps of brands. This study reviews the extant literature on the effect of consumer expertise on cognitive structure, develops hypotheses and tests those in an empirical study.

Section snippets

The relation between brand ownership and cognitive structures

The amount, content and organization of product knowledge differ greatly between experts and novices (Mitchell and Dacin, 1996). Experience plays an important role in the development of cognitive structures (Zinkhan and Braunsberger, 2004). Brand owners are likely to differ from non-owners in terms of a greater liking, familiarity and involvement with the brand (Kirmani, Sood and Bridges, 1999). In this way, brand owners are in a favorable starting position to become brand experts, and the

Methods

Snowboard brands provide the field for testing the hypotheses. Snowboarding is a relatively young industry, with sufficient variation between more and less established brands. Snowboarding has such an appeal to part of the population (Howe, 1998) that a reasonable number of “experts” is likely to arise, which can be contrasted with a sufficient number of non-experts. Moreover, in a flat and snowless country like the Netherlands, the population of snowboarders has little other choice than using

Results

The left pane of Fig. 1 shows the causal structures for respondents who never owned a snowboard of the respective brand. The right pane shows the structures for those who own or have owned the brand (henceforth the “owners”). These maps build upon the average ratings for each possible causal relation, applying a cut-off point of 0.60, which implies that the figures only show relations with which at least 60% of the respondents agree. The selection of a reasonable cut-off point keeps the figures

Discussion

This is the first study to show that brand owners have more elaborate causal brand structures than non-owners. A notable exception is the leading brand in the industry, Burton, for which the impact of ownership appears negligible. This can be due to the dominant position of this brand in the market. Burton is the only brand which is familiar to 100% of respondents in the pretest (the other 3 brands are familiar to about 70% of respondents).

Fig. 1 shows how the structure for Burton, for owners

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