The ways we perceive – Publication by Ákos Varga

Private label market shares are continuously increasing all around the world challenging manufacturer brands in different product categories. While investments in quality, design, and marketing communication of private labels have positively influenced consumer perceptions, manufacturer brands still hold the dominant position when it comes to brand preference. 

However, there are only a few studies on consumers’ explicit and implicit brand attitudes that produced inconsistent results. We conducted four studies in three product categories and five countries using implicit association test (IAT) to explore implicit and explicit attitudes towards private labels and manufacturer brands and their ability to predict purchase intention. Our findings indicate that the IAT can be used to measure implicit brand preferences and that consumers both implicitly and explicitly perceive manufacturer brands more positively. However, implicit measurers, compared to explicit, do not have a statistically significant predictive power when it comes to purchase intention of private labels.