An empirical study of industrial consumer buying behaviour: how airlines buy airplanes

We show that commercial aircraft customers buy aircraft brands probabilistically and that their aggregate buying patterns conform to the well-known double jeopardy and duplication of purchase laws. This is a major conceptual contribution to the analysis of industrial buyer behavior with important implications for industrial marketing management. Analysis using stochastic models of brand choice with consumer panel data is the norm in fmcg categories, but the lack of such data in industrial markets should not be seen as insuperable; a variety of data gathering techniques make it possible to assemble sufficient data even in markets where purchases are spread out over many years. Thus our second contribution is to show that competitive market structure can be revealed by data readily available to marketing managers that can be analyzed simply, with basic analysis tool, but with profound managerial implications.