Kunter Gunasti

Creating an Environment in Which Youths Are Encouraged to Eat a Healthier Diet

More than one-third of young people in the United States are either obese or at risk of becoming obese. The authors consider how food marketers have contributed to this problem and how they might help resolve it. The article organizes the marketing activities of food-related companies around the classic four Ps. The authors first discuss product, price, and promotion in terms of past, present, and potential future industry actions. They then discuss place as a function of four key commercial end points in the food channel: (1) supermarkets, (2) convenience stores, (3) restaurants, and (4) schools. The authors consider government actions in terms of how they affect the actions of both the food industry and consumers. Throughout the article, the authors consider how extant research can be extended in an effort to better understand and address the youth obesity problem.

How Inferences about Missing Attributes Decrease the Tendency to Defer Choice and Increase Purchase Probability

Most purchases involve choices among options with incomplete attribute information. In such situations, consumers often have the option not to choose any of the alternatives to avoid uncertainty. Alternatively, consumers can make inferences about the missing attributes. These inferences may occur spontaneously, or they may be strategically prompted. In five studies, it is shown that both explicitly and implicitly prompting consumers to make inferences about the missing attributes reduces the tendency to select the no-choice option and increases the likelihood of making a purchase decision. In parallel, consumers who generate spontaneous inferences are also less likely to defer their choices.

How and When Alphanumeric Brand Names Affect Consumer Preferences

This research develops a taxonomy of alphanumeric brand names (ABs) based on the alignment between the brand names and their links to products and attributes. Five empirical studies reveal that ABs have systematic effects on consumers’ product choices, moderated by consumers’ need for cognition, the availability of product attribute information, and the taxonomic category of the AB. In an identical choice set, the choice share of a product option whose brand name takes a higher versus lower numeric portion (e.g., X-200 versus X-100) increases, and it is preferred more even when it is objectively inferior to other choice alternatives. Consumers with low need for cognition use “the higher, the better” heuristic to select options labeled with ABs and choose brands with higher numeric portions. Consumers with high need for cognition process ABs more systematically and make inferences about attribute values based on brand name–attribute correlations. The effects of ABs on consumer preferences are prevalent for most technical products, even when consumers do not know the product category or meanings of attributes.

Original brands in competition against high quality copycats

Purpose Copycat brands offering improved product quality pose serious challenges to original brands. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of why consumers prefer copycat brands with superior product attributes and how original brands can shift this preference back by strategically leveraging brand identity cues. Design/methodology/approach Four experimental studies test different types of brand identity cues that original brands can use to influence consumer preferences. Logistic and linear regression analyses analyze the effects. Findings The results systematically show the power of brand identity cues in helping original brands reduce share loss to copycat brands using superior product attributes. They also reveal the role of brand equity, conspicuous consumption and consumers’ tendency of using brands as status symbols in enhancing the effect of brand identity cues in the face of superior copycats. Research limitations/implications This paper extends cue diagnosticity theory and the brand identity literature by showing the power of brand identity cues in predicting consumer choices of original brands. Practical implications This paper provides useful guidelines for managers of original brands on how to effectively use brand identity cues to compete against copycats. Originality/value Prior research focuses on how copycat brands’ characteristics influence consumers’ evaluations of copycats. These studies are limited, however, by their focus on cheap and low-quality copycats. The current paper examines the effects of brand identity cues and draws attention to the trade-offs consumers make when choosing between original brands and copycats offering superior product features.