Brand and Retailer Strategies in Recessions

THE EFFECT OF BUSINESS-CYCLE FLUCTUATIONS ON PRIVATELABEL SHARE: WHAT HAS MARKETING CONDUCT GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Lien Lamey Barbara Deleersnyder Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp Marnik G. Dekimpe*

* Lien Lamey is Assistant Professor of Marketing, Lessius University College, Belgium and Affiliated Researcher, Catholic University Leuven, Belgium (e-mail: lien.lamey@lessius.eu). Barbara Deleersnyder is Associate Professor of Marketing, Tilburg University, the Netherlands (e-mail: b.deleersnyder@uvt.nl). Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp is C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Marketing Area Chair, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (e-mail: JBS@unc.edu). Marnik G. Dekimpe is Research Professor of Marketing, Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and Professor of Marketing, Catholic University Leuven, Belgium (e-mail: m.g.dekimpe@uvt.nl). The authors thank AiMark and Peter Fader for providing the data, and greatly appreciate the valuable suggestions by Harald van Heerde, the editor and the anonymous reviewers. They gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Flemish Science Foundation (F.W.O.) under grants nr. G.0116.04 and nr. G.0751.11, from the Marketing Science Institute through the Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Competition, and the Zyman Institute of Brand Science through the ZIBS Doctoral Dissertation Competition. Finally, the authors also gratefully acknowledge the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Society New Zeeland (Marsden fund 10-UOW-068) for research support.

THE EFFECT OF BUSINESS-CYCLE FLUCTUATIONS ON PRIVATE-LABEL SHARE: WHAT HAS MARKETING CONDUCT GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Abstract The authors investigate whether, and to what extent, marketing conduct varies over the business cycle, and how this contributes to the growing popularity of private labels. To address this, a unique dataset is examined that combines a broad set of seven marketing-mix instruments with private-label share,...