Differentiation or Salience
Andrew Ehrenberg, Neil Barnard and John Scriven
Why is the market leader often ten times as big as the tenth biggest brand? The evidence says that it is not due to brand differentiation. Each brand's customers do not look at their brand as being very different. Instead, what differs is the number of people to whom each brand is salient.
In this paper we first critically review the notions of brand differentiation and of major sustainable competitive advantages. These are widely thought to be crucial. However, the users of competitive...