The competing roles of variety seeking in new brand adoption

We examine how consumers' attribute-level variety-seeking behaviors can explain their propensity to adopt a new brand in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. We leverage consumers' purchase history among extant brands prior to a new brand introduction as an indicator of the new brand adoption upon its launch. We incorporate variety seeking at two product attribute levels – brand and flavor – and find that variety seeking along these two dimensions predicts different outcomes for new brand adoptions. The estimation results of our discrete-time hazard model show that consumers' brand-level and flavor-level variety-seeking behaviors affect their likelihood to adopt a new brand in different manners: consumers who purchase various brands are more likely to adopt a new brand, whereas those who choose various flavors are less likely to adopt a new brand. The results also show that the new brand's price promotions and in-store displays can affect the role of variety seeking in consumers' new brand adoption. We assess the robustness of our findings by replicating our empirical model with an additional measure of variety seeking as well as a variety-seeking measure in another product category.