Under review at Marketing Science

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 in-store visual attention doubles on average the memory-based probability of consideration. Additionally, our empirical applications and normative analyses show how separating memory-based and visual equity can help improve managerial decisions about which brands to select for enhanced point-of-purchase marketing activities. Keywords: Point-of-purchase marketing, eye-tracking data, probability model, retailing, bran