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We have observed that competitive repeat purchase markets are polarised into two radically different structures. The first and best known we call repertoire markets; these have few solely loyal buyers as most buyers allocate their category requirements across several brands in a steady fashion. The other we call subscription markets; these have many solely loyal buyers as most buyers allocate category requirements entirely to one brand. This is an empirical difference rather than a theoretical distinction, and surprisingly there appear to be no markets which occupy the middle ground between these two extremes. The repertoire-subscription distinction turns out to be an important boundary condition for some well-established generalisations about repeat purchase behavior. Despite this, the NBD-Dirichlet model of purchase incidence and brand choice fits both types of markets, and the differences in loyalty are adequately captured by the Dirichlet's switching parameter, S. This represents an important extension of the generalisability of the Dirichlet, allowing the insights gained from repertoire market analysis to be applied to customer churn analysis in subscription markets.

Historically, brand salience has been considered synonymous with the brand being ‘top of mind’ (mentioned first) when the product category is used to cue retrieval from memory. In this article we argue that this conceptualization (and associated measure) is too narrow. We show that there is value in distinguishing salience from the concepts of awareness and attitude by conceptualizing brand salience as the brand’s propensity to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations. Brand salience reflects the quantity and quality of the network of memory structures buyers’ hold about the brands. This article offers guidelines to facilitate research on the role of brand salience in brand choice and buyer behaviour that are an important progression from the evaluation (attitude) focus of contemporary marketing theory.

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