Piet Vanden Abeele

Decline and variability in brand loyalty

Abstract In this paper, we examine the over-time behavior of brand loyalty for a large set of brands drawn from 21 consumer packaged goods categories. Using the brand-loyalty operationalization of Colombo and Morrison (1989), the following conclusions are obtained. First, little support is found for the often-heard contention that brand loyalty is gradually declining over time. Second, while the short-run variability around a brands mean loyalty level is not negligible, no evidence is found that this variability has systematically increased over time, and it can be reduced considerably through a simple smoothing procedure. Finally, the brand-loyalty pattern for market-share leaders is found to be more stable than for other brands. The study findings were robust to variation in the time interval used to construct the switching matrices, and to different treatments of multiple purchases.

Economic Agents’ Expectations in a Psychological Perspective

A quick overview of the literature on the psychology of human behavior will reveal that the concept of expectation is a very central one for the explanation of real-life behavioral phenomena. This is true especially for cognitively oriented approaches, but also for behavioristic or learning approaches (e.g., Tolman’s concept of expectation in learning theory). Since economic psychology, as an applied discipline, has real-life behavior as its concern, it is to be “expected” that the expectations concept plays a major role in this field. This chapter, which is devoted to the concept of expectations in economic psychology, will first explore the theoretical standing of the expectations concept in psychology, in economics and in economic psychology. Next, the operational aspects of measuring expectations and of using them in behavioral forecasts and control will be the concern.

Strategies of belgian high-tech firms

Abstract This survey study replicates a previous study by R. Cooper on the nature and performance of new product strategies. New product strategies as well as performance are analyzed in their constitutive dimensions and related to one another. The analysis reveals a number of factors underlying strategy and performance, but no strategic clusters. The relationship of strategy to performance is seen to differ depending on the size of the firm. This leads us to propose different optimal product innovation strategies for small as compared to large companies.

Specification and empirical evaluation of a cluster-asymmetry market share model

Asymmetric models of market share response allow for specific cross-competitive effects between competitors. Various approaches have been suggested for building asymmetric market share models preserving the properties of logical consistency (i.e., respecting the sum and range constraints on market share) of the popular attraction formulation, including the recent “fully extended” attraction specification by Carpenter et al. (1988). It is argued that these approaches suffer from a number of theoretical or practical difficulties. Using the Nested Logit model as a source of inspiration, this paper introduces a simple and tractable cluster-asymmetric attraction specification for market share response and discusses its properties. The model is also shown to be related to the Cooper et al. approach. The specification is applied and evaluated in the context of a consumer appliance example.

Boorstin's consumption community concept: A tale of two countries

The concept of consumption community, first proposed by historian Daniel Boorstin, claims that in the modern era of high mobility, people look not only to neighborhood as a basis for feelings of community but also to communality of consumption behavior (e.g., drinking the same brand of beer). The idea was tested cross-nationally by administering a newly devised psychological sense of community (PSC) scale to more than 100 adult respondents in Belgium and a like number in the U.S. The findings support Boorstin in that for both national samples, PSC values for consumption items were generally positive and consistent with social science theoretical expectations. Implications of the study findings are discussed for theory and social policy.ZusammenfassungDas Konzept der Konsumgemeinschaft von Boorstin: Eine Geschichte von zwei Ländern. Das Konzept der Konsumgemeinschaft, erstmals durch den Historiker Daniel Boorstin vorgestellt, behauptet, da\ im heutigen Zeitalter hoher Mobilität der Einzelne sein Gemeinschaftsgefühl nicht nur durch seine Beziehung aus der direkten Nachbarschaft bezieht, sondern auch aus der Gemeinsamkeit bestimmter Konsumverhaltensweisen (z. B. das Trinken derselben Biermarke). Diese Idee wurde empirisch geprüft durch eine ländervergleichende Untersuchung, in der eine neu entwickelte psychologische Skala für den Gemeinschaftssinn bei jeweils einer Stichprobe von mehr als 100 erwachsenen Personen in Belgien und in den USA angewendet wurde. Die Ergebnisse stützen Boorstin insofern, als beide Länderstichproben zu Skalenwerten führen, die mit den theoretischen sozialwirtschaftlichen Erwartungen übereinstimmen.

The sociotropic aspect of consumer confidence

Abstract The unidimensionality of consumer confidence, a U.S. leading indicator, is investigated in the European Economic Community (EEC). The present findings confirm American and European evidence that the confidence indicators now in use are not unidimensional. They also point to a strong ‘sociotropic’ component of consumer confidence in each of the four largest nations of the EEC. The present results are provided by model-based survey measures which, unlike the status quo indicators, can be quality checked.