Consumer "Confusion" of Origin and Brand Similarity Perceptions

BARBARA LOKEN is Assistant Professor of Marketing and IVAN Ross is Professor of Marketing, both in the School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455. RONALD L. HINKLE is founder of Market Metrics, 3615 15th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55407. This research was supported in part by a grant from the School of Management, University of Minnesota, to the first author. We wish to thank Orville Walker, Dick Cardozo, Bob Hansen, and Jim Ward for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript and Jane StoUer and Sheila Nichols for their assistance in data collection. In our fiercely competitive marketplace it is not surprising that companies spend millions of dollars in establishing and protecting trademarks by which their various products and services come to be recognized and valued by consumers [Levy and Rook 1981]. Trademarks serve to identify the product or service so that the consumer can be assured that goods marked with the same name, symbol, or other design characteristics indeed come from the same source and therefore that the marks can be relied upon to signify some standard of quality. It is also not surprising that some companies choose to imitate characteristics of successful products. Consumers might attribute to these new products perceptions of performance, function, quality, or some other favorable meaning associated with the imitated product. Without such attributions companies would have to spend the substantial sums required to teach the consumer associations or beliefs in conjunction with separate marks. As a result, it is commonplace to see bottle shapes, package designs/graphics, and color schemes in many product categories which quite resemble one another, certainly to a much greater extent than would have been expected by chance had there been independent consideration given to these design or other physical features decisions. As Levitt [1966] has noted, most of what we might see as "new" in the marketplace is not new at all, but is rather "innovative imitation." Indeed, some companies have achieved their niche in the marketplace as "imitators," and the recent advent of trade magazines devoted to private label brands suggests such imitation is certainly not on the decline [see also Fortune 1979]. Some of this imitation is legal and some is not. That which is not is often dealt with in the context of trademark infringement litigation {under the Lanham Act) or under some other unfair trade statute. This article will focus upon how similarities between products in their physical appearance may relate to perceptions of product origin and what implications this relationship may have for consumer "confusion" in the marketplace.