FINDING CHOICE ALTERNATIVES IN MEMORY - PROBABILITY-MODELS OF BRAND-NAME RECALL

Recalling brand names is an important aspect of consumer choice in man y situations. The authors develop a general Markov model that relates probabilistic aspects of recall to consumer and marketing mix variable s. Then they illustrate how parameters can be estimated from recall da ta for three special cases of the model: The first is a ''baseline'' v ersion of the model that can be used to assess the extent to which cat egories of brands can be automatically included in or excluded from me mory search; the second is a zero-order model that can be used to esti mate the effects of brand variables and individual usage rates on reca ll latency; and the third is a first-order model that uses aggregate r ecall data to assess market structure. Finally, the authors demonstrat e how the model can be used in numerical analyses to evaluate awarenes s-building strategies.