The Relationship Between the Marketing Mixand Share of Category Requirements

A criticism of purchase-basedbrand loyalty measures is that they are confounded by the marketing mix variablesthat affect brand choice. This paper investigates the magnitude and direction of the associations for share of categoryrequirements (SCR), defined as each brand’s share among the group of households who bought the brand at leastonce during the time period under consideration.We discuss the theoretical foundations for the relationshipsbetween SCR and a set of marketing mix variables (price, promotions,retail distribution)and conduct a latentstructure regression analysis of brand-level data to test these relationships.We find that, although the relationshipbetween the marketing mix variables and SCR is statistically signilicant, in real terms the magnitude of the associationis fairly low