Shadow brands – exploring phenomenon of meaningless brands
Shadow brands – exploring phenomenon of meaningless brands

Summary/Abstract: Marketing practitioners believe in high significance of their brands and high utility of their products. They perpetuate a viewpoint of brands serving as mental shortcuts, which facilitate purchase decisions, and they consider brands to be highly important throughout the whole consumption process. Interestingly, there exist some premises which suggest that the role of brands in consumers’ lives is overestimated. The objective of the present study was therefore to gain insight into this phenomenon and examine the real importance of brands in consumers’ everydayness. A researcher metaphor of a shadow brand was introduced and diverse qualitative methods were applied. The initial findings suggest that almost all consumed brands remain overshadowed; high involvement brands can be equally meaningless as low involvement ones; neither purchase frequency, perceived quality, nor trust, increase probability of moving a brand out of shadow.

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