Attraction and superiority effects in the Chilean marketplace: Do they exist with real brands?

Consumer researchers show much interest in how the addition of products to a choice set changes the alignment of choice shares of existing products, specifically the attraction and superiority effects. Research in developed countries accounts for the vast majority of studies on these effects. Findings demonstrate that the attraction and superiority effects are robust when brand names are absent from product offerings. Testing whether these effects, with unbranded alternatives, will generalize to a different cultural context, in particular the Chilean market, is important. In addition, this paper extends prior research by further testing the generalizability of these effects in more realistic market scenarios that include brand alternatives. In the absence of brands, these effects generalize to the Chilean market; however, the inclusion of brands moderates these effects such that the results show no evidence of the attraction or superiority effects when the entrant's brand is more familiar than competitors' brands. The explanation for this observation is that consumers prefer more familiar brand alternatives even when these options are inferior with regard to product attribute trade-offs.