ERP evidence for consumer evaluation of copycat brands

Qian Shang, Guanxiong Pei, Jia Jin, Wuke Zhang, Yuran Wang and Xiaoyi Wang

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-13

Abstract: Copycat brands mimic brand leaders to free ride on the latter's equity. However, little is known regarding if and how consumers confuse copycat as leading brand in purchasing. In this study, we applied a word-pair evaluation paradigm in which the first word was a brand name (copycat vs. normal brand both similar with a leading brand in category), followed by a product name (near vs. far from the leading brand’s category). Behavioral results showed that, when the product is near the leader’s category, the copycat strategy (CN) was more preferred compared to the normal brand (NN) but not different in the far product condition (CF and NF). Event-related potential (ERP) data provided further insight into the mechanism. The N400 amplitude elicited by the CN condition was significantly smaller than NN. However, when products are far from the leader’s category, there was no significant difference in N400 amplitudes. For the late positive component (LPC), the CN gave rise to a larger amplitude than the CF. The N400 amplitude was suggested to reflect the categorization process, and the LPC demonstrated the recollection process in long-term memory. These findings imply that the copycat brand strategy is generally only effective when products are within the category of the leading brand, which offers important implications for marketing practices.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191475 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 91475&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0191475

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191475

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().