Investigating the effect of imitation level, imitation type and brand language on recognition of original brand from copycat

The brand name and logo design of the brand companies are their visual identity. Today, the copying of this key asset is a common practice and is considered as an applied strategy, and because of the lack of a standard for exact brand recognition, imitation of the original brand has made it difficult to create legal barriers in this regard. For this purpose this research aims to investigate the effect of imitation level, imitation type and brand language on recognition of original brand from copycat (A-lstar and Hakopian) with cooperation of 134 participants. The experiment consist of 2*2 imitation type (brand name and logo) and brand language (Farsi and English). Data were analyzed by Friedman and Kruskal-Wallis tests, as well as image processing techniques. The results showed that changing the brand name is more effective than logo transformation in identifying the imitation brand, and the brand language and main brand reminder also play a role in identifying imitation. In addition, the results of data analysis using image processing techniques show the effect of the change on imitation detection. The differentiated threshold of consumer perception for Al-Star brand was about 17% and the Hakopian was about 76%.