Assessing the Risk of Consumer Confusion: Practical Test Results

The proliferation of lookalike products in the 1990s has led to concerns from brand owners that their brand equity is being eroded by increasing consumer confusion. Our study develops a test for confusion combining two instruments to minimise bias and remove problems of survey and panel data techniques. Our test products are six product pairs (a brand and a lookalike) from five fmcg product categories and our measure of confusion is the mistaken identification of a product. Recall and recognition are tested to give a composite measure of confusion. Our results show consumer confusion can occur in varying degrees. However the correlation between design similarity and confusion is low (r=0.08) suggesting other factors e.g. level of involvement and brand dominance also have an effect.