A new brand’s behaviour in an established market

Although managers can use panel data to monitor their brands’ performance in fast‐moving‐consumer‐goods categories, the regularities researchers have documented apply to stationary and unpartitioned marketplaces. However, the introduction of a new brand may alter the structure of a marketplace and thus the behaviour patterns consumers display. This paper discusses the regularities typically observed in stable markets and considers these in the context of a market that had just experienced a new brand launch. It is concluded that the new brand behaved as an established brand very quickly and that the generalisations used to benchmark existing brands provided accurate predictions of the new brand’s performance.