Brand Metrics

Measuring Brand Efficacy along the Customer Journey

Jacek Kall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367765040
• eBook ISBN: 9781000436570
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book gathers and explains the key brand analysis tools that measure brand effectiveness and awareness along the customer journey.

Rather than considering how to build and manage a brand, Brand Metrics shows students the methods by which they can assess the current market position of the brand and design effective strategies for the future. Each chapter follows the same logical and accessible structure, defining each metric and its usage, presenting the calculations, showing how the data should be interpreted, offering case studies and examples, presenting recommendations and offering questions for further discussion. The metrics covered in the book correspond with the customer journey, moving through measuring brand awareness, consideration and purchase, to customer loyalty and brand advocacy, and finally an overall analysis of the brand's strength.

The book not only shows the formula for a metric and explains how it should be interpreted, but also considers what each metric really measures, how it impacts the brand's equity and how it is related to other metrics. As such it should be perfect recommended reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Strategic Brand Management, Marketing Planning and Strategy, Marketing and Branding Metrics.

1 Measuring brand awareness

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167235-1

Learning objectives:

After reading this chapter you should

• understand what brand awareness is and why it is necessary for building a strong brand;
• be able to discuss the role of categorization in understanding awareness measurement;
• be familiar with three awareness metrics: aided awareness, spontaneous awareness and top-of-the-mind awareness;
• understand the concepts of ‘brand salience’ and ‘brand dominance’;
• recognize the limitations of awareness metrics.

We are at the beginning of the customer’s journey. Customers need to be aware that a brand exists that might solve their problems or deliver promised rewards. It is the brand owner’s first responsibility to make the brand ‘visible’ in places where its target audience might be looking for solutions to their problems. And this does not necessarily mean that a brand must be active on mass media.

1.1 Awareness explained

There is no doubt that if we think of a brand, its strength and its influence on the decision-making process and user satisfaction, then the brand must be known to the buyer. If a consumer standing in front of a store shelf is considering buying a no-name product, it is probably a result of the need for variety-seeking (e.g. ‘I have never eaten those sweets, I have never heard of them, but I will gladly try them, just out of curiosity because the package looks so funny’), which is accompanied by a limited risk (low probability of dissatisfaction with consumption, and in the case of dissatisfaction, a small financial loss). However, such situations of buying unknown brands just out of curiosity are rare. Our reptile brain (see Appendix 1) definitely feels safer when choosing known objects, and not completely unfamiliar ones. Aaker (2011) claims that consumers prefer what is familiar to them in every aspect of their lives. And if we think of building a strong brand, we need to understand that consumers cannot love a brand of which they have barely heard (Steenkamp 2017). It is not surprising then, that there is a strong correlation between brand awareness and brand trial (see Section 3.2.1), as observed by Nielsen Market Research Agency among others (Watts 2020).

Now, let’s return to the purchase decision-making process. Consumers start their shopping by choosing a product category, the purchase of which will provide them with rewards or allow them to avoid problems. But only then will they choose the brand. It’s hard to imagine that desire comes first, ‘I have to buy something from Bosch, Samsung, …’, and only then is the decision made to choose the product from those brands. Even for such a strong brand as Apple, the hierarchy of decisions is predictable: product category (tablets, smartphones) and then the brand and model. In seldom cases (those exceptions might be the purchase of clothes, but also such a mundane category as bakeries), the decision sequence might be the opposite: we first decide which fashion store or bakery to enter, and only when we are inside will we choose specific products: slouchy or slim fit jeans? baguette or bread?

If that is so, we first need to understand how the consumer groups the offerings of different companies operating within a specific category (a process called ‘categorization’), which will help us in measuring awareness.

1.1.1 Categorization

Definition: The process of grouping objects into categories based on the perceived similarities between them is called categorization .

Categorization makes it easier to deal with a lot of information reaching our brain. Psychologists Stasiuk and Maison (2014) explain that for human beings, seeing their surroundings through the lens of categories is natural and categorization is crucial in the process of learning about and understanding the world around us. With regard to products, De Plessis (2011) states that consumers will inevitably classify all new brands in terms of existing product categories. When shopping, by assigning a brand to a specific category, the need to seek further information is reduced (Aaker 2011). Because I have decided I need a tablet and not ‘any device functioning thanks to the operating system and software, with the help of which you can do various tasks and enjoy games or films’ (this condition is met by a smartphone, laptop and desktop computer, and to some extent also a smart TV and a few other devices), further decisions (which brand, which model) can be taken much faster.

When encountering a new brand, consumers usually use the following heuristics (Aaker 2011):

1. Assigning a brand ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Measuring brand awareness
• 2 Measuring brand consideration
• 3 Measuring brand purchases
• 4 Measuring post-purchase evaluation
• 5 Measuring customer retention and loyalty
• 6 Measuring brand advocacy
• 7 Holistic metrics of a brand’s health
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: How does our brain operate?
• Appendix 2: Category penetration
• Appendix 3: Additional metrics regarding repeat and first-time buyers
• Appendix 4: Brand Development Index
• Index