Brand Management in Hospitality: An Empirical Test of The Brisoux-Laroche Model [Summary]

The hospitality industry in America is highly competitive, with numerous brands offering thousands of products targeting different types of American consumers. The Brisoux and Laroche (1980) model shows that when a consumer is faced with a multiple brand situation, he or she would simplify the available information by categorizing the total available brands into four sets. After classifying the brands into four types, one may make a purchase choice from the evoked set.

According to Brisoux and Laroche (1980), this is a dynamic model in which brands may move from one set to the other due to various internal and external factors. Internal factors include changes in psychographic and demographic matters and personal preferences of consumers. External factors may include situations such as marketing activities of the excluded and included brands, new product introductions, brand withdrawals, changes in competitive intensity, changes in the general and task environment, and life cycle stages of the available brands. This study has provided empirical support to the existence of four awareness sets and the relationships among the three brand groups in each set. Providing further support to the proposed model using net utility values is one of the major contributions of this study. Use of net utility values to identify various brands and their level of acceptance by the consumers is a major finding. This model could also be used in conjunction with various brands from the hotel and tourism segments of the hospitality industry. In sum, the consumers’ selection process involves the categorization of available brands as four distinct sets of awareness (evoked, hold, reject, and foggy). These available sets can be further examined according to three subgroups of brands (leading, intermediate, and low).