خط‌مشی‌های تبلیغاتی قیاسی همبسته و ناهمبسته در توسعه موقعیت برندها

When marketplace dynamics prompt a familiar brand to change its positioning, consumers often meet such attempts with resistance. This research demonstrates how familiar brands can incorporate new attribute information into the brand's position via comparative advertising in order to broaden the brand's marketplace positioning. Study 1 shows how the use and nature of comparative advertising affects the ability of a familiar brand to broaden its positioning. Studies 2a and 2b demonstrate that a comparative advertising strategy that incorporates a specific sequencing of dissociative and associative comparative advertisements best broadens brand positioning.

The Midas Company, faced with a 15% sales decline in the exhaust replacement business due to longer-lasting original mufflers, changed its positioning from a singular focus on muffler replacement (“We install mufflers for a living. We have to do a better job”), to one that emphasizes a wide variety of auto repair services (“It's like a spa treatment for your car.” Halliday, 2000). More recently, KFC announced an attempt to alter its positioning due to growth in the fast-casual dining sector, slowdown in the firm's existing quick-service restaurant sector, and an attempt to appeal to younger consumers. The firm opened KFC eleven, an upmarket restaurant paying homage to its famous Original Recipe chicken but offering contemporary menu options and more sophisticated décor (Horovitz, 2013). These brief examples represent firms' efforts to broaden the positioning of their familiar brands. Broadening a familiar brand's positioning means associating the brand to new attribute information while retaining certain favorable associations to existing attributes. Broadening, rather than repositioning completely away from the existing positioning, allows a firm to maintain the desirable aspects of its positioning while contemporaneously addressing the changing marketplace conditions that rendered the original positioning ineffective. In a dynamic marketplace, a firm must proactively manage brand position to retain its advantage (Park et al., 1986 and Punj and Moon, 2002), which may require modifying the original positioning over time (Danneels, 2011, Kaul and Rao, 1995 and Porter, 1996). However, broadening the positioning of a familiar brand can be a daunting task (Ellickson, Misra, & Nair, 2012). Over time, as the brand strengthens associations to the attributes that comprise its existing positioning, the familiar brand simultaneously precludes association to new attributes (Jewell & Unnava, 2003). Consumers may reject any new attribute association they perceive as incongruent with the familiar brand's existing positioning (Desai and Ratneshwar, 2003 and Herr et al., 1983). The present work examines the extent to which a familiar brand can encourage the acceptance of new attribute information, thus broadening brand positioning. Specifically, this research considers how explicit contextual referents, such as those employed in comparative advertising, may facilitate the acceptance of new attribute information for a familiar brand. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of comparative versus noncomparative advertising in broadening the positioning of a familiar brand, and reveals that the nature of the comparative advertising matters. Further, this research shows that the broadening of brand positioning is best accomplished by establishing and strengthening the new brand-attribute association through a specific sequential comparative advertising campaign strategy.

This research provides a framework that demonstrates how a familiar brand with strong preexisting associations to its product category can broaden its positioning in the marketplace, given that these preexisting attributes may impede the acceptance of new attribute information for the familiar brand. The present research contributes to the comparative advertising literature by showing how comparative advertising can broaden the positioning of familiar brands. This approach offers a practical solution for marketers facing marketplace challenges that necessitate a broadening of brand positioning. This work is the first to consider a sequential approach to comparative advertising intended to broaden brand position. Past research on comparative advertising has claimed that new brands benefit more from comparative advertising than established brands, as researchers generally viewed the tactic as a method by which a new brand could associate itself with the beneficial attributes of a market leader (Grewal, Kavanoor, Fern, Costley, & Barnes, 1997). This research extends more recent findings that show comparative advertising can result in differentiation between brands (e.g., Manning et al., 2001 and Soscia et al., 2010), and reveals that the tactic may facilitate the acceptance of new information associated with a familiar brand by first establishing and subsequently strengthening the new association. While consumers' acceptance of a brand's broadened positioning is crucial, broadened positioning is not the sole determinant of marketplace success. Dynamic capability theory (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000 and Teece et al., 1997) suggests that the firms best able to adapt to changing environments are those with the ability to leverage their existing resources, create new resources, access external resources, and release inefficient or outdated resources. Among these modes of adaptation, the ability to leverage the brand and its associations is essential (Danneels, 2011), but may not be sufficient if the firm is unable to leverage, create, access, and/or divest other technological and/or market-based resources. Therefore, this paper gives marketers a tool by which they may leverage one of their most powerful resources, the brand, in the face of dynamic marketplace challenges. These results demonstrate that consumer acceptance of new attribute information into a familiar brand's positioning can be directly influenced by tactics under the marketer's control.