How do the marketing laws of Double Jeopardy and Duplication of Purchase help us understand how brands compete?
In a nutshell
- Marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have provided us with marketing laws about how brands compete.
- These laws are useful for understanding competition at a purchase level, but what about at an awareness and consideration level?
- Research is indicating that as brand recognition grows, so too will unaided brand recall and brand consideration.
- Awareness and consideration is shared across brands in line with the awareness and consideration penetration of each brand, respectively.
The ultimate goal of most brands is to increase market share. Luckily, over the past few decades Byron Sharp and his team of marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have provided us with multiple marketing laws that tell us how brands compete in competitive marketplaces. Two of these important marketing laws are Double Jeopardy (DJ) and Duplication of Purchase (DoP), which we’ll explain in a bit of detail for those unfamiliar.
1. DJ highlights that market share is primarily driven by the amount of brand buyers (market penetration) rather than how often each of those buyers purchase the brand (purchase frequency).
The DJ name stems from the fact that brands with lower market share tend to have fewer buyers and these buyers tend to purchase the brand slightly less often. Brand building is therefore about attracting more customers.
2. DoP is another marketing pattern that favours bigger brands.
The pattern reveals that brands share a greater amount of their buyers with bigger brands (those with higher market share and penetration) than they do with the smaller brands. The DoP pattern emerges because in most repertoire markets customers tend to purchase multiple competing brands over time, with an increasing likelihood that they will buy the bigger brands as these brands have greater brand salience among a larger audience of buyers.
Thanks to these marketing laws, we know a lot about how brands compete at a purchase level.
These laws have shaped TRA’s Five golden rules for brand building and is why Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow book is one of our recommended readings. Although, while these patterns are golden for understanding brand competition at a purchase level, it has been unclear whether these lawlike patterns persist at a brand awareness and consideration level. This kind of knowledge would help determine if there is a set of marketing laws that dictate the amount of brand recall and consideration we can achieve based on brand recognition, as well as how awareness and consideration is shared across brands.
In fact, I recently published research in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour with some useful insights into this matter. As part of my ongoing PhD in marketing at Massey University, my colleagues and I investigated whether DJ and DoP patterns hold across brand recall, recognition and consideration data collected across five categories in New Zealand (n=1,862).
The study firstly found a DJ pattern where brands with high recognition also benefited from higher brand recall and brand consideration. In fact, there is an upward-sloping exponential relationship between brand recognition and brand consideration, indicating that there is extra ‘consideration benefits’ for brands that are highly recognised.
Secondly, the study found Duplication of Awareness and Duplication of Consideration patterns. Let’s take the example of fruit juice, and the brand Simply Squeezed, from the study to illustrate this pattern. Simply Squeezed was found to have the sixth greatest awareness penetration in the fruit juice category (52%) – the proportion of consumers sampled that recognised the brand when provided with the brand name and logo. However, 95% of those respondents that were aware of Simply Squeezed were also aware of the market leader Just Juice (91% awareness penetration), while only 28% were also aware of Homegrown (17% awareness penetration).
This example highlights the Duplication of Awareness pattern – the amount of awareness sharing between brands is based on the awareness penetration of each brand. Brands have greater awareness duplication with brands with high awareness than with brands that have low awareness. This pattern is seen across each of the five categories studied and is seen when brand consideration data is examined.
These findings reinforce TRA’s approach to brand building.
To build a strong brand we ultimately need to start by reaching large audiences and building brand recognition. As brand recognition grows, so too will unaided brand recall and brand consideration. Effectively building and leveraging distinctive brand assets and brand associations is an important part of this process.
Here at TRA, we can help brands understand their awareness and consideration performance in comparison to other competitors in the category. We can also measure the performance of your distinctive brand assets and identify your key brand associations. This will give a baseline performance that can be tracked over time and used to determine the influence of marketing initiatives at shifting key brand-building metrics.
