From Marketing Mix to Consumer Behaviour: A Conceptual Decomposition and Empirical Analysis to Refine Market Share Management

ABSTRACT In the retail context, consumers frequently choose between national brands and private labels. This poses a strategic challenge for companies: how to optimally configure their marketing mix to effectively align with consumer preferences through pricing strategies, promotional activities, or assortment adjustments? Against this backdrop, the present study introduces an empirical approach to refine marketing mix management. Specifically, we decompose and comparatively analyse the market shares of national brands and private labels across regular and promotional price settings. This approach enables both researchers and practitioners to identify shifts in consumer behaviour between products sold at regular prices and those sold under promotion. Using fixed effects regression models on transaction data from 29 380 households and 9 012 531 purchases over a 15‐year period covering four product categories and 10 retailers in Germany, we examine how various marketing mix variables influence these shifts. The results show that price changes and promotional activities drive shifts within market shares between regular‐ and promotional‐price products, while changes in national brand assortment dominance do not prompt such internal shifts. These patterns could not be revealed with previous analytical approaches, underscoring the theoretical and managerial relevance of the proposed decomposition method. This research offers valuable insights into consumer decision‐making and market share dynamics and lays the groundwork for future applications of market share decomposition in marketing research. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the approach is not limited to market shares but can also be extended to other dependent variables, such as volume‐based sales or revenue.