Gilles Laurent

Repeat Purchasing of New Automobiles by Older Consumers: Empirical Evidence and Interpretations

In a large empirical study, the authors find that older consumers, who constitute an important market segment, repurchase a brand more frequently when they buy a new car. Older consumers consider fewer brands, fewer dealers, and fewer models, and they choose long-established brands more often. To interpret the results, the authors rely on four age-related theoretical perspectives: biological aging, cognitive decline, socioemotional selectivity, and change aversion.

Research Traditions in Marketing

This book reviews the past twenty years of research in marketing by considering the different research streams together to understand, evaluate and criticize those various streams and to explore potential overlaps and divergence likely to emerge in the future. In addition, careful attention has been paid to represent a balance of European and North American scholarship in both quantitative and qualitative research traditions. The book is organized into quantitative and qualitative parts. The quantitative articles include such topics as marketing models, econometrics, productivity in marketing, diffusion of innovation and industrial marketing; the qualitative articles include consumer behavior, industrial marketing and industrial marketing networks, and perspectives on marketing from other sciences.

Consumers' Immediate Memory for Prices

We examine the cognitive mechanics involved in keeping prices in short-term memory for subsequent recall. Consumers code and store prices verbally, visually, and in terms of their magnitude. The encoding used influences immediate recall performance. The memorability of prices depends on their verbal length, usualness, and overall magnitude. We find that the performance of consumers is affected by their pronunciation speed and price abbreviation habits. Overall, consumers recall prices better than what previous digit span studies with simple numbers have suggested.

Engineering Hedonic Attributes to Generate Perceptions of Luxury: Consumer Perception of an Everyday Sound

For the last twenty years, the perception of hedonic attributes has been a problematic matter in consumer research. We argue that the perception of a hedonic product attribute should not be considered as an irreducible holistic experience, but rather as a complex set of sensory experiences, the components of which are identifiable and quantifiable. We provide evidence for this position by proposing a reliable method linking the features of product-related sound stimuli to consumer perception of hedonic attributes. To our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind offering a detailed investigation of consumer perception of everyday sounds (as opposed to music). We discuss managerial and consumer-level implications of the findings and provide an agenda for future research.

Improving the external validity of marketing models

A number of marketing models lack validity, in the sense that they do not adequately describe the variables and relationships in the real system being modeled. This is illustrated by recent examples of causal, econometric and analytic models. I discuss possible solutions, on the basis of selected references.

Integrating consumer characteristics into the stochastic modelling of purchase loyalty

Purpose – This paper aims to extend a widely used stochastic model of purchase loyalty to include covariates such as demographics, psychographics and geodemographics. Potentially, this allows covariates to explain variations in brand performance measures (BPMs) such as penetration/reach, average purchase frequency, sole buying, share of category requirements, repeat purchase and so forth. The result is to integrate consumer-based segmentation into previously unsegmented stochastic models of brand performance. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes a model for predicting BPMs. Covariates are then introduced into the model, with discussion of model specification, model estimation, overall model assessment, and the derivation of generalised theoretical BPMs. The outcome is a practical procedure for behavioural loyalty segmentation. Findings – The implications for strategy and management in applying covariates to the BPMs are considerable. Where there are concentrations of consumers with high repe...

Brand Loyalty vs. Loyalty to Product Attributes

Typically, in a specific category, a product or service can be defined not only by the brand it bears but also by multiple other attributes (e.g., pack size, price level, product formulation): a total of ten attributes for our example, detergents. While many papers have been devoted to brand loyalty, very few have been devoted to loyalty to other attributes: Is a household loyal to a certain pack size? To a certain price level? To a certain product formulation? These questions have important managerial implications in terms of the design and management of a brand’s product line. In this paper, we propose a systematic comparison of brand loyalty against loyalty to other attributes. We show that the two common measures of behavioural loyalty, share of category requirements and repeat rate, have problematic validity, due to the confounding influence of market share and purchase rate. In contrast, we argue that the Polarization index avoids these confounds and is therefore a better measure of loyalty. On the example of detergents, we show how to use Polarization to compare behavioural loyalty across attributes (e.g., are households more loyal to brands or to price levels?) and across different levels of one attribute (e.g., are consumers more loyal to high price levels than to low price levels?).

Temporary brand–retailer alliance model: the routes to purchase intentions for selective brands and mass retailers

ABSTRACT We investigate a common but under-studied practice, the temporary alliance between a selective brand and a mass retailer, online or offline. Using a before-and-after methodology, we show how the attitude towards the new offer of a selective brand at a mass retailer plays a central mediating role. It is influenced by brand–retailer fit and product-category fit. It influences purchase intention towards the new offer, attitude changes towards the selective brand and mass retailer, and therefore purchase intention towards the brand and retailer. We also reveal a counterintuitive direct negative route from product-category fit to changes in purchase intention towards the retailer. To offer important managerial implications, we break out results for two selective brands and two types of mass retailers.

Investigating Brand Verbal Fluency: When known brands do not come to mind

We define Brand Verbal Fluency as the ability of a consumer, when cued with a product category, to name the brands he or she knows in that category. We see that frequently not all the known brands come to the consumer’s mind (62% failure in our sample). Our analysis of which brands are named (and which ones are not) builds on findings from psychological research on Semantic verbal fluency (the ability to name items in a category, for example, animals). We adopt an innovative micro-analysis at the level of consumer–brand dyads to investigate the Brand Verbal Fluency of consumers aged 19–77 in the category of radio stations. Prior research would almost certainly have predicted a negative impact of consumer age on brand verbal fluency, mediated by declining cognitive ability, but this holds only for recent brands. Older brands appear to be less prone to the danger of not coming to the mind of older consumers.