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The study investigates the long-term erosion of repeat-purchase loyalty among consumers who purchase brands in a one-year base period.

The study uses a five-year consumer panel of continuous reporters. We identify brand buyers in a base year, then calculate the proportion that fail to buy the brand in later years. We analyse the top 20 brands in 10 consumer goods categories.

We find pronounced erosion in repeat-buying over the long-term. The proportion of buyers from a base year that fail to buy in a later year increases steadily over time, from 57% in year 2 to 71.5% by year 5. Moreover, we identify brand and marketing mix factors linked to this over-time customer loss or erosion.

The study provides evidence that consumers’ propensity to buy particular brands changes over a period of years, even though those brands continue to exhibit a stable market share. This evidence provides a different interpretation than the literature to date, which has viewed purchase propensities as fixed.

The study finds that store brands and niche brands exhibit lower levels of erosion in their buyer base; that a broad range is associated with lower erosion, and that high price promotion incidence is associated with lower erosion for manufacturer brands.

Loyalty erosion has been reported before (Ehrenberg, 1988; East and Hammond, 1996) but only over short periods. This study examines the phenomenon over five years, confirms that the rate of erosion does diminish over time, and that it is related to category and brand characteristics, as well as marketing mix decisions.

This study examines the association between behavioral loyalty and satisfaction scores for banks. Past work has generally viewed the link between satisfaction and loyalty to be one way – satisfaction causes or induces loyalty. This study suggests the relationship may not be just one-way, and that current loyal behavior towards banks (measured as using 1, 2 or 3 banks) may be related to satisfaction scores: the more banks used, the lower the satisfaction score.

The study employs large-scale survey data from the UK YouGov panel. It analyses satisfaction scores for 16 banks, from consumers who use either 1, 2 or 3 banks.

Banks receive lower satisfaction scores from their customers who use one other bank, compared to customers who do not use one other bank. Furthermore, users of two banks are less satisfied with either of them compared to users of one, and users of three banks are, on average, less satisfied with each of them compared to users of two.

The results will help managers and researchers better understand satisfaction scores. For example, part of the reason why a bank obtains low satisfaction scores could be that it has a large proportion of dual or multi-bank customers. Next, knowing that satisfaction scores differ according to the number of banks currently used may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the link between satisfaction and future loyalty.

The study is highly original in proposing a novel hypothesis relating to bank usage and how it relates to satisfaction scores.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which temporary price promotions attract people who do not normally buy a brand, and whether buyers change their propensity to buy the promoted brand afterwards.

The study analyses promotions in 18 consumer goods categories in the UK and USA. It calculates the proportion of promotion purchasers that have bought a brand at least once in their last five purchases and the Share of Category Requirements of those purchasers. These figures are then compared to normal-price purchasers.

The study finds the majority of price-promotion buyers already bought the brand at least once in their last five category purchases (average = 77 per cent). This figure is similar to that for normal-price purchases (average = 81 per cent). Average Household SCR to the brand is also very similar for price-promotion purchases compared to normal price purchases. Therefore, promotions do not attract a markedly different mix of buyers. Furthermore, buyer propensity to buy the brand is the same after a promotion purchase as it was before.

A contribution of the paper is that it supports a theory of consumers as cognitive misers, who screen out promotion information about unfamiliar brands. The paper also highlights that in packaged-goods markets, consumers can be generally seen as experienced buyers, who do not learn new information from buying brands they have previously purchased.

The managerial implication is that price promotions must be judged on their immediate profitability. There seems little recourse to the idea they can result in “try it, like it, buy it again later” effects.

While many studies have examined the effects of price promotions, this is the first to explicitly compare the mix of buyers attracted from a price promotion to that which occurs when a brand is sold at normal price.

This paper aims to investigate factors associated with higher or lower television audience retention from one programme aired sequentially after another, referred to as lead-in audience retention. Lead-in is a primary determinant of television programme audience size.

The study models a series of factors linked to lead-in audience retention, such as rating of the second programme, genre match and competitor options. The hypothesised relationships are tested across over 1,000 pairs of programmes aired in the UK and Australia, using multivariate linear regression models.

The study finds the factors consistently related to significantly higher lead-in audience retention are the rating of the second programme in the pair and news genre match in programming. Factors consistently linked to lower audience retention include the rating of the initial programme and the number of competitor options starting at the same time as the second programme.

The findings help television networks understand drivers of lead-in audience retention. Knowledge that can be used to inform the design of tailored marketing plans for programmes based on schedule, timing and adjacent programming. Further, the findings help advertisers and media buyers with scheduling television advertising to achieve reach or frequency objectives.

No previous studies have comprehensively combined all four factors driving lead-in audience retention into a single model. The testing across multiple markets adds to the robustness of the findings. In particular, the discoveries about the impact of competitor network activities and genre build considerably on past research.

The purpose of this paper is to determine if services brands such as banks share their customers with competing brands in line with the market share of those competitors, and whether services brands with similar images form market partitions with heightened competitive intensity.

The study uses brand usage, forced-choice and brand perceptions data obtained from a survey of consumers. The study uses a log-linear modelling framework to identify market structure and to test if partitions correspond to similarities in brand image.

Analysis of in-market data shows customers share their requirements between competing brands in line with market share, and that brands with similar images do not form partitions. However, when consumers are asked to choose brands for a specific product, there is some tentative evidence of brand partitions among brands with similar brand image.

The results here can help managers in service markets such as banking and insurance understand market structure. As a result, they can better plan customer acquisition and retention strategies.

The study addresses a lack of research into customer sharing and switching in services markets. No previous study has successfully employed brand-sharing, forced-choice and brand image data to identify market structure in a services context.

Describes a real‐life market assessment study where the market and product were quite unfamiliar to the researcher. It shows the task to be an iterative, circuitous procedure under such circumstances. Describes several methods used to successfully overcome problems in obtaining information. It makes some contrasts between textbook recommendations and what was found in practice. A model of the process is created, based on observations made in the paper. Summarises by making four major points which may assist others undertaking such projects. These relate to (1) identifying secondary data sources, (2) tracking down industry experts for interview, (3) some methods that were used to overcome prospective respondents’ reluctance to be interviewed, and (4) how the research should seek to confirm information provided by other sources but also look for inconsistencies which can be a basis for further inquiry.

The current work reviews all retailing articles published in four prominent retailing journals – Journal of Retailing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, and International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research – in the 2009-2015 period, picking up where Runyan and Hyun (2009) left off. The purpose of this paper is to identify leading authors and institutions in retailing research based on overall impact.

Content analysis/literature review/descriptive research.

In total, 1,392 articles were published during this time period, and through a procedure of weights and adjustments for author count, journal impact, journal quality, and journal publishing opportunity, the findings reveal that research collaboration is highly prevalent, as evidenced by the high number of multi-authored papers and cross-university/international partnerships. Additionally, some authors and institutions remain influential, while others have emerged as highly influential in the last seven years. This shows the dynamic nature of the field and the need to remain active in quality publishing.

Scholars must understand that several factors influence impact judgments, which cannot be assessed using raw counts alone. Journal quality, impact, and publishing opportunity as well as author counts are important elements to consider.

These reviews are vital to the field in that they provide status updates on scholarship, so these reviews should be done periodically. Additionally, the findings in this paper provide a more holistic understanding of research impact and permit better assessment for scholars and administrators.

New product introductions, particularly line extensions (LEs), are common in consumer goods categories. Despite their commonality, the success of LEs are not guaranteed. The purpose of this study is to provide brands that introduce LEs a benchmark about what success to expect.

This study investigates the success of 36,994 LEs in each quarter for the first three years after introduction. Four indicators are calculated using consumer panel data to benchmark how long LEs survive (failure rate), how competitive they are in the category (market share) and how they are adopted by category buyers (penetration and repeat buyer rate).

Most LEs survive after the first year, but many cease to exist or perform well in the long term. Around 50% of LEs fail a year after launch, but this failure rate halves once seasonal LEs are removed. Failure rates start to approach 80% after three years. Most LEs do not perform better than existing products. Around three in four LEs have a market share or penetration near or below the category norm. Although this percentage decreases the longer after launch, most LEs are still below the category norm.

These new product success benchmarks provide guidelines to practitioners about what success the “typical” LE will achieve. This research can help guide new product investment decisions because it provides context on what is feasible to achieve.

Four market success measures are used, a departure from past benchmarking research which uses practitioner evaluation on metrics seldom used in practice. The authors provide guidelines about when and how to measure LE and new product success more broadly.

The 2005 APSR article by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing presented data from the Virginia 30,000 Health & Lifestyle Questionnaire (VA30K), AARP twin studies, and an Australian twin study (ATR) to test their hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by genetic as well as environmental factors. Political attitudes, they suggested, were expected to be highly heritable and particularly so on issues most correlated with personality. They employed survey responses from the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory to measure political attitudes. To gauge heritability, they utilize the 2:1 genetic ratio between monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. The authors argued that while previous studies in political attitudes had concentrated on measuring the influence of environmental variables, their test added explanatory power by considering heritability (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005).