Framing the Game: How Positioning Brands in Competition Can Be Strategically Used to Increase Brand Value

A prominent narrative in contemporary consumer culture is one in which “category killer” brands like Amazon, Starbucks, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart are forcing mom and pop independent bookstores, coffee shops, hardware stores, and retailers out of business. The narrative tells us that consumers are switching their loyalties from independently owned and operated businesses to big box retailers (Hosein and Hughes 2006; Spector 2005). However, recent anecdotal evidence suggests this narrative misses part of the story. For example, when Coldstone Creamery, a national chain, moved in across the street from independently-owned J.P. Licks ice cream in Newton, Massachusetts, consumers rallied around J.P. Licks and drove Coldstone out of town. When Starbucks moved in next door to Los Angeles’s Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, sales at the local café ironically went up. This activity suggests that consumers may be willing express their political will in the marketplace and protect small, independent brands from aggressive competition. In this article, we explore the effect of competitive framing, positioning brands in competition with one another, and show that small brands can paradoxically benefit from having a large competitor. Unlike prior research that focuses on the dyadic relationship between a consumer and a brand, we provide a networked understanding of how consumers assess brands not in isolation, but as part of a competitive system. We explore the effects of competition and show how changing the competitive framing of the marketplace positively and negatively affects consumers’ support for the brands within it. Our results show that consumers’ brand evaluations are not dependent only on dyadic interactions between a consumer and a firm, but rather are also influenced by the web of competitive relationships within which the brand is entangled. Our results highlight how brands, both big and small, can frame a competitive context to increase purchase interest, real choice, and dollars spent in the marketplace.