The relationship between the marketing mix and share of category requirements

A criticism of purchase-based brand loyalty measures is that they are confounded by the marketing mix variables that affect brand choice. This paper investigates the magnitude and direction of the associations for share of category requirements (SCR), defined as each brand's share among the group of households who bought the brand at least once during the time period under consideration. We discuss the theoretical foundations for the relationships between SCR and a set of marketing mix variables (price, promotions, retail distribution) and conduct a latent structure regression analysis of brand-level data to test these relationships. We find that, although the relationship between the marketing mix variables and SCR is statistically significant, in real terms the magnitude of the association is fairly low.