A442 Exam 3

Quantitative Research

- A more definitive assessment of the depth and breadth of brand awareness, the strength, favorability, and uniqueness of brand associations, consumer beliefs, and relationships Methods - Brand Awareness - Brand Image - Brand Responses - Brand relationships

Methods of Measuring Brand Equity

- Comparative - Conjoint Analysis - Holistic - Residual - Valuation

Qualitative Research

- Relatively unstructured measurement approaches that permit a range of both questions and answers to explore consumer brand/product perceptions that are difficult to uncover Methods - free associations - Projective Techniques - Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Techniques - Neural Research Method - Brand personality and Value - Ethnographic and experiential method Criteria to Judge (powerpoint slide 16 - Direction - Depth - Diversity

Preliminary Activities

1. a number of prior research studies may exist and be relevant (reports in company archives) 2. useful to interview internal personnel - insights not captured in reports - diversity of opinion - inconsistencies or misconceptions may exist internally

Six Customer-Related Benefits

1. perception of better product or service performance 2. greater loyalty and less vulnerability to competitive marketing actions and marketing crises 3. Larger Margins and more inelastic responses to price increases and elastic responses to price decreases 4. Greater trade cooperation and support 5. increased marketing communication effectiveness 6. opportunity for successful licensing and brand extension

Guidelines for measuring and creating ROI from brand marketing activities

1. spend wisely 2. look for benchmarks 3. be strategic 4. be observant

Mental Map

Accurately portrays in detail all salient brand associations and responses for a particular target market - simplest way to create a mental map: ask consumers for top-of-mind brand associations Core Brand Associations - abstract associations that serve as the basis of brand positioning in terms of how they create POPs and PODs

Steps of a Brand Audit

Brand Inventory - to provide a current, comprehensive profile of how all the products and services sold by a company are marketed and branded (pg. 300) - Helps suggest what consumers' current perceptions may be based on - reveals the extent of brand consistency - provides insight into how brand equity can be managed Brand Exploratory - provides detailed information about what consumers actually think about the brand - understanding what consumers think and feel

Brand Relationships (quantitative)

Characterized in terms of brand resonance and measures for following key dimensions (activity): - Behavioral loyalty •Past/future purchase history/intentions •Force choice of one of two or more brands •Offer multiple choice or rating scales - Attitudinal Attachment •Brand love •Brand-self connections •Brand prominence - Sense of Community •Extent to which people share the brand in lives •Discuss info about brand as social currency - Active Engagement •Do they invest time, energy and money beyond purchase or consumption?

Brand Responses (quantitative)

Purchase Intentions - To forecast a likely purchase you need to specify the circumstances •purpose, location, time, etc. •definitely would/would not buy Likelihood to Recommend - "How likely is it that you would recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?" •0-10 point scale (0-6 detractors; 9-10 promoters) •Net Promoter Score (NPS)

ROMI

Return on Marketing Investment; increases accountability has forced marketers to address tough challenges and develop new measurement approaches - tension between demonstrating short-term profitability versus investing in long-term value - emphasis on long-term value rather than short-term profitability

Goal of a Brand Exploratory

Uncover the current knowledge structures for the core brand and its competitors, as well as determining the desired brand awareness and brand image and POPs and PODs

How to achieve ideal positioning for a brand

achieve congruence among 4 considerations 1. what customers currently believe about the brand (credibility) 2. what customers will value in the brand 3. what the firm is currently saying about the brand 4. where the firm would like to take the brand

Brand equity is a multidimensional concept

applying multiple measures increases the diagnostic power of marketing research and the likelihood that managers will better understand what is happening to their brands, and why •Single measures of brand equity provide at best a one- or two-dimensional view of a brand •No single number or measure fully captures brand equity •There are many different sources of, and outcomes from, brand equity, depending on the marketers' skill and ingenuity

Accounting Background (Valuation)

assets of a firm can either be tangible or intangible tangible: property, plant, and equipment; current assets; investments in stocks and bonds intangible: any factors of production or specialized resources that permit the company to earn cash flows in excess of the return on tangible assets

Brand Tracking Studies

collect information from consumers on a routine basis over time, typically through quantitative measures of brand performance on a number of key dimensions marketers can identify in the brand audit or other means - Product brand tracking tracking an individual branded product requires measuring brand awareness and image, using both recognition and recall measures moving from more general to more specific questions - Corporate or Family Brand Tracking When a brand is identified with multiple products: •What products come to mind when you think of [family brand]? •Are you aware of [sub-brand name]? •There are many different products associated with [family brand]. Which ones are most important to you in formulating your opinion about the brand? - Global Tracking if your tracking covers more diverse geographic markets, especially in both developing and developed countries, then you may need a broader set of background measures to put the brand development in those markets in the right perspective

Brand Audit

comprehensive examination of a brand to discover its sources of brand equity - marketing audit: comprehensive, systematic independent, and periodic examination of a company's marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities with a view of determining problem areas and opportunities and recommending a plan of action to improve the company's marketing performance

Brand Concept Map

elicits brand association networks from consumers and aggregates individual maps and into a consensus map - structures the brand elicitation stage of identifying brand associations by providing survey respondents with a set of brand associations used in the mapping stage

Historical Perspectives (valuation)

identifying brand's recent past

General Approaches (Valuation)

in determining the value of a brand in an acquisition or merger, firms can choose from: the cost, the market and income approaches

Interbrand's Brand Valuation Methodology (Valuation)

leading brand valuation firm: Interbrand 1. financial forecast 2. role of brand 3. strength analysis

Holistic Methods

place an overall value on the brand in either abstract utility terms or concrete financial terms - attempt to "net out" various considerations Residual approach: Examines the value of the brand by subtracting consumers' preferences for the brand from their overall brand preferences (scanner panel, choice experiments, multi-attribute attitude models) Advantage: provide useful benchmark for interpreting brand equity Disadvantage: most appropriate for brands with a lot of product-related attribute associations Valuation Approach: Places a financial value on brand equity (accounting background, historical perspectives, general approaches, Simon and Sullivan's Brand Equity Value, Interbrand's Brand Valuation Methodology)

Comparative Methods

research studies or experiments that examine consumer attitudes and behavior toward a brand to directly estimate specific benefits arising from having a high level of awareness and strong, favorable, and unique brand associations - brand-based comparative approaches use experiments or analyses in which one group of consumers responds to an element of the marketing program or some marketing activity when it is attributed to a competitive or fictitiously named brand (blind testing research studies) Competitive brands used as benchmarks by consumers •Exemplar: Category leader or some other brand that consumers feel is representative of the category, like their most preferred brand Advantage: isolates value of a brand Disadvantage: may highlight product characteristics to the point of becoming more salient than they would be otherwise - marketing-based comparative approaches use experiments or analyses in which consumers respond to changes in elements of the marketing program or some marketing activity for the target brand or competitive brands - Hold the brand fixed and examine consumer response based on changes in the marketing program (exploring price premiums) Advantage: ease of implementation Disadvantage: difficult to discern whether consumer responses to changes in the marketing stimuli are being caused by brand knowledge or by more generic product knowledge

Brand Equity Management System

set of organizational processes designed to improve the understanding and use of the brand equity concept within a firm three major steps: 1. creating brand charters or bibles 2. assembling brand equity reports 3. defining brand equity responsibilities - one of the biggest threats to establishing brand equity comes from within an organization

Conjoint Analysis (comparative method)

survey-based multivariate technique that enables marketers to profile the consumer decision process with respect to products and brands part-worth: value consumers attach to each attribute level - brand and price trade-off Advantage: allows us to study different brands and different aspects of the product or marketing program simultaneously Disadvantage: marketing profiles may violate consumers' expectations based on what they already know about brands

Social Media Monitoring and Listening

track brand and product mentions across various online social media sources volume: number of times a given brand is mentioned in various social media sources valence: quantifies the extent of which these brand mentions are positive or negative

6 main facets of brand relationship quality

• Love/passion • Self-concept connection • Interdependence • Commitment • Intimacy • Brand partner quality

Guidelines for Quantitative Research

•Assess the depth and breadth of brand awareness by employing various cues •Assess all potentially salient associations identified by the qualitative research phase according to their strength, favorability, and uniqueness •Examine both specific brand beliefs and overall attitudes and behaviors to reveal potential sources and outcomes of brand equity •Conduct similar types of research for competitors to better understand their sources of brand equity and how they compare with the target brand

Brand Image (quantitative)

•Associations that consumers hold for a brand •Useful for marketers to make a distinction between: •Lower-level considerations - performance and imagery •Higher-level considerations - judgements and feelings •Rate belief associations on the basis of strength, favorability and uniqueness - Beliefs: Descriptive thoughts that a person holds about something Multidimensional scaling (MDS) - Transforms consumer judgements of similarity or preference (on any basis) into distances represented in perceptual space

Brand Personality and Values (qualitative)

•Brand personality - Human characteristics or traits that consumers can attribute to a brand •The big five - Brand personality scale used to measure: •Sincerity •Excitement •Competence •Sophistication •Ruggedness

Projective Techniques (qualitative)

•Diagnostic tools to uncover the true opinions and feelings of consumers when: They are unwilling or unable to express themselves •Present consumers with ambiguous stimulus and ask them to make sense of it - completion and interpretation of tasks - comparisons task - archetypes

Neural Research Methods (qualitative)

•Neuromarketing - Study of how the brain responds to marketing stimuli, including brands •Research indicates that consumer buying decision is a unconscious habitual process

Free Associations (qualitative)

•Powerful way to profile brand associations •Without any specific probe, consumers narrate: What comes to their mind when they think about the brand or the associated product category •Help form a rough mental map for the brand •Indicate the relative strength, favorability, and uniqueness of brand associations

Brand Awareness (quantitative)

•Recognition •Shown a set of items or elements and asked if have previously seen or heard them; chance to assess visual aspects •Decoys, partial/masked, or distorted•Yes or no; how confident •Recall •Unaided - "all brands" as a cue; likely to only identify the strongest •Aided - various cues (e.g., product class, category or type; attributes; usage or situation •Right circumstances, speed, ease, order, and corrections for guessing •Strategic implications: •Yields insight into how brand knowledge is organized in memory •Identifies cues or reminders necessary for consumers to retrieve the brand from memory

ZMET (qualitative)

•Uncovers hidden thoughts and feelings which can be expressed using metaphors •Metaphor - Defining one thing in terms of another •Elicits interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior •Construct - An abstraction created by the researcher to capture common ideas or themes expressed by customers •Represents thoughts that are tacit, implicit, and unspoken

Ethnographic and Experiential Methods

•Use "thick description" based on participant observation •Goal: Extract and interpret the deep cultural meaning of events and activities •Examples: •Consumer immersion •Site visits; home visits •Shop-alongs; mystery shoppers •Digital cameras, compact videos, and diaries •Beeper studies •Online search behaviors •Cons: time-consuming, expensive and based on subjective interpretation