Effects of Generic Marketing on Market Shares
(A2026-133863)

AUTHORS

Nhat Le, Norwegian School of Economics; Magne Supphellen, Norwegian School of Economics; Rajeev Batra, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Alan Mathew Kunnumpuram, Norwegian School of Economics; Rosalie Lai, NHH Norwegian School of Economics

ABSTRACT

Previous research suggests that generic marketing mainly affects category (and not brand-level) demand. We argue and show that there are brand-level consequences as well, because generic marketing can increase consumer attention to across-brand differences. Using a market share attraction model on 13,616 weekly observations from 20 Norwegian meat categories, we investigate how generic marketing influences brand-level market shares and brand advertising responsiveness. Our findings reveal that high levels of generic advertising reinforce the positive effect of brand-specific advertising, whereas high levels of generic publicity – measured as the total mentions or percentage of negative mentions – attenuates brand advertising effectiveness. Importantly, both generic marketing and website-level image and traffic can redistribute brands’ market shares within a category. These results confirm that generic marketing and generic websites have great potential to stimulate brand differences.