The Influence of Product Variety on Brand Perception and Choice

By Jonah A. Berger, Michaela Draganska, Itamar Simonson. 2007

296 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose that the variety a brand offers often serves as a quality cue and thus influences which brand consumers choose. Specifically, brands that offer a greater variety of options that appear compatible and require similar skills tend to be perceived as having greater category expertise or core competency in the category, which, in turn, enhances their perceived quality and purchase likelihood. Six studies support this proposition and demonstrate that compared to brands which offer fewer products, a brands which offer increased compatible variety are perceived as having higher quality; b this effect is mediated by product variety's impact on perceived expertise; c the higher perceived quality produces a greater choice share of the higher variety brand, even among consumers who select options that multiple brands offer and d product variety also impacts post-experience perceptions of taste. The findings suggest that in addition to directly affecting brand choice share through influencing the fit with consumer preferences, product line length can also indirectly affect brand choice through influencing perceived brand quality.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ddfcb82f513958eece0fe99d0515fb01e7f6ecb

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Citations in the corpus

Brains and brands: Developing mutually informative research in neuroscience and marketing (2008, background): “In another interesting study, Berger et al. (2007) looked at the relationship between the perception of the quality of a brand and the number of products offered.”
Nonprofits are seen as warm and for-profits as competent: Firm stereotypes matter (2010, background): “Extant research shows that sources vary on credibility, which has a significant impact on persuasion (e.g., Berger et al. 2007; Sternthal, Dholakia, and Leavitt 1978).”
Remanufacturing, Third-Party Competition, and Consumers' Perceived Value of New Products (2012, background): “Second, it is well established that consumers often rely on cues or signals (Nelson 1970, Kirmani and Rao 2000) such as product variety (Berger et al. 2007), market share (Hellofs and Jacobson 1999), seller reputation (Purohit and Srivastava 2001), or resale value (Pierce 2012), when evaluating the…”
Variety, Vice, and Virtue: How Assortment Size Influences Option Choice (2009, background): “DOI: 10.1086/593692 Variety, Vice, and Virtue: How Assortment Size”
The Asymmetric Effects of Extending Brands to Lower and Higher Quality (2011, background): “Lowerquality line extensions reduced perceived brand prestige, consistent with negative quality-association effects (Janiszewski and Van Osselaer 2000), but increased perceived brand innovativeness, consistent with positive variety effects (Berger, Draganska, and Simonson 2007).”