Modeling mental market share

Normative benchmarks for a brand's network of associations provide managers with guidelines to set brand strategy. Benchmarks also help marketers evaluate the impact of marketing activities. This paper outlines an approach to obtain benchmarks for the relative size and structure of a brand's associative network using the NBD-Dirichlet model (Goodhardt, Ehrenberg, & Chatfield, 1984). The results reveal an excellent fit, showing that the NBD-Dirchlet is able to obtain predictions for a brand's mental market share. This finding has implications for understanding of the structure of consumers' memory for brands and the dynamic nature of the associative network across brands and time.