Determinants of Trademark Dilution

A hierarchical Bayes associative network model for brand information is developed and tested to measure the extent of harm from trademark dilution. In the proposed model, category activation thresholds are modeled in terms of brand/category familiarity, activation flows are modeled in terms of relative category knowledge, and consumer confusion and its correlates are used to capture the asymmetric fan effects on retrieval probabilities for first and second users. 3 4 Owners of well-known brand names want to maintain the strength and selling power of these valuable but intangible assets. While brand managers have direct control over how their brand names are used in brand extensions, they have considerably less control over how they are used by other entities. If another firm were to use a famous brand name in such a way as to cause consumer confusion or deception regarding product source, the original owner of the brand name could sue the "second user " on the basis of trademark infringement. But the imitative use of a brand name does not always cause confusion among consumers, particularly when it is used in a product category completely unrelated to that of the original brand user