Unseen is Unsold: Assessing Visual Equity with Commercial Eye-Tracking Data

In today’s cluttered retail environments, creating consumer pull through memory-based brand equity is not enough; marketers must also create “visual equity” for their brands (i.e., incremental sales triggered by in-store visual attention). In this paper, we show that commercial eye-tracking data, analyzed using a simple decision-path model of visual attention and brand consideration, can separately measure memory-based and visual equity of brands displayed on a supermarket shelf. In the two product categories studied, juices and detergents, we find that instore visual attention doubles on average the memory-based probability of consideration. Additionally, our empirical applications and normative analyses show how separating memorybased and visual equity can help improve managerial decisions about which brands to select for enhanced point-of-purchase marketing activities.