Brand Prominence

What it is

How conspicuous a brand's mark or logo is on a product. Young Jee Han, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze introduced the construct in the Journal of Marketing in 2010.

It sits close to Inconspicuous Consumption, The Success Game and Formal Clothing and Abstract Processing in the wider body of research, and is best taken as one idea among several rather than a stand-alone rule.

In effect

In the 2010 paper, the authors sorted consumers into four groups by wealth and need for status. Wealthy consumers with a low need for status favoured understated goods that only their peers would recognise. Field experiments and market data supported the model. Colour was not tested.

What it does not say

The finding comes from the studies named on this page and describes a pattern in those samples. It does not show that the pattern holds for every person, product or market, and it does not tell a brand what to do on its own. It is one input to a decision, to be weighed with other evidence.

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