Consumer confusion from own brand lookalikes: An exploratory investigation

Abstract

Lookalikes are a new generation of own brand products that have similar packaging and labelling characteristics to leading branded products. Their current success and proliferation (in Britain) has raised ethical and legal issues about whether they confuse consumers. A set of factors that foster or inhibit consumer confusion adapted from a framework on consumer confusion, were tested on a sample of 50 shoppers at the end of their shopping visit. No incidents of consumers having falsely bought a lookalike product were identified. However, low‐price products subject to impulse buying were found to be more likely to confuse shoppers. Additionally, elderly and impulsive shoppers appear to be more susceptible to confusion. Thus, effective brand identification or confusion‐protection strategies are more important for the above sets of products and shoppers. However, future research should concentrate on what extent consumers infer “misleading” that the original brand attributes are similar to the lookalike brand attributes and how this is linked to their choice.

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