2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Assessing the Risk of Consumer Confusion: Practical Test Results
Authors : Wendy Lomax, Emma Sherski, Sarah Todd
Published in: Global Perspectives in Marketing for the 21st Century
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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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.