Determining Brand Awareness and Attitudes - Analytics for the Customer Journey - Customer Analytics For Dummies (2015)

Customer Analytics For Dummies (2015)

Part III

Analytics for the Customer Journey

Chapter 8

Determining Brand Awareness and Attitudes

In This Chapter

arrow Valuing brand awareness and attitudes

arrow Measuring brand awareness

arrow Asking aided and unaided branding questions

When marketers talk about brands, familiar companies and products come to mind — think Coca-Cola, Nike, BMW, or Rolex. But think about the last time you purchased something in a category about which you were unfamiliar with the brands — perhaps ceiling fans, windshield wipers, or website hosts.

All things being equal, consumers prefer brands they know rather than brands they have not heard of.

Customers generally progress through stages of the hierarchy of effects: They become familiar with a brand, form an attitude about the brand through repeated usage, and finally, become loyal to that brand. (It’s part of the customer journey; if you’re unfamiliar with the customer journey, see Chapter 7.)

The hierarchy of effects provides a framework for you to measure. Customers’ attitudes toward brands and products are constantly changing. In this chapter, I show you how to measure brand awareness, attitudes, and experiences.

Measuring Brand Awareness

You measure brand awareness using two approaches:

· Unaided awareness: Asking customers what their favorite brands are

· Aided awareness: Asking customers to rank brands from a list that you provide

tip You can ask aided and unaided brand questions in the same survey to current or prospective customers. When you do, ask the unaided questions first to minimize the suggestion bias and to discover which brands are top of mind. Then ask the aided branded questions by listing relevant brands and include an “Other” option so participants can provide any brands you might not have considered competition.

Unaided awareness

The best way to measure unaided brand awareness is to ask customers which brands come to mind when thinking about a particular product or service. Here are some examples:

· List mobile phone manufacturers.

· List three makes and models of family sedans.

· Name four rental car companies.

Keep your unaided awareness questions open ended so customers provide written responses. Categorize each response and then compute the frequency of each response. This number can constitute a benchmark from which you measure future improvements.

tip Finding a benchmark is helpful before key events, such as an advertising campaign or prior to a new product introduction. It also provides an idea about the competitive landscape by providing a relative rank of where your product falls relative to the others that participants mention.

Count the number of participants who mention a brand and convert that total to a percentage; then put confidence intervals around the percentage. (See Chapter 2 for a reminder on how to use confidence intervals). The confidence intervals provide the best estimate for how aware all prospective customers are about a brand from the sample of customers.

For example, in a survey of brand awareness for computers, 120 prospective customers were asked to list the brands they’d consider if they were to purchase a new laptop in the next six months. In total, participants listed ten brands; 60% of respondents mentioned Apple and 20% listed Sony (see Figure 8-1). According to the results, although Apple clearly has more top-of-mind share than Sony, this data suggests that sales can be increased by increasing prospective laptop buyers’ awareness of Sony’s laptop products. The confidence intervals indicate how much the mind share would change if more customers were sampled (these are shown as the small black lines in Figure 8-1). The lower and upper bounds of the Sony unaided awareness are 14% and 28%, respectively. This means we can be 95% confident that at least 14% and no more than 28% of prospective customers have Sony in mind when considering laptop purchases.

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Figure 8-1: More consumers mention Apple over Sony.

Aided awareness

With aided awareness, you provide a list of brands to the customers and ask them to identify which ones they are familiar with. Your aided awareness questions are multiple-select questions, meaning customers can select as many companies or products that they recognize. For example:

· Which of the following laptop manufacturers are you familiar with (select all that apply)?

· Samsung

· Acer

· Dell

· Gateway

· Apple

· Lenovo

· Toshiba

· Sony

· Prionsonic

· Zenith


Intel brand and product awareness

Intel wanted to determine how well consumers understood its class of laptops called Ultrabooks — lightweight laptops with solid-state hard drives and premium features.

The study involved asking unaided, and then aided, questions about features. Via an open-ended Comment box, participants were asked what they thought an Ultrabook was:

· Customers used phrases like “A very thin laptop” and “A laptop with superior features.” Both responses exhibited knowledge about the new product category.

· Other comments, however, illustrated confusion — for example, “It’s a laptop without any added features.”

Then survey participants were asked to select from a number of alternatives features that defined Ultrabooks, such as solid-state hard-drives, to assess how strong their product knowledge was. This information was used to understand how effective marketing campaigns had been and identify the messages that needed to be reinforced on Intel’s website and in its TV advertisements.


warning Aided awareness questions are less of an indication of top-of-mind awareness and more a measure of familiarity. Similar to a multiple-choice test, the mere suggestion of a brand may lead customers to select brands they aren’t familiar with.

tip To get an idea about how suggesting brands may unintentionally prompt your customers, include some “distractor” brands to see which percentage of customer select it. For example, in the list of laptops from earlier, Prionsonic is fake and Zenith doesn’t make laptops. You can use the percentage of customers who select these distractor brands as a way to gauge how reliable your aided brand results are.

Measuring product or service knowledge

Having awareness with a brand is one level of familiarity. But most brands have a range of products and services. For example, Apple has iTunes, iPad, and iCloud. Google has Gmail, Drive, and Search. Customers may be more or less familiar with different products, and it’s often helpful to dig deeper into both product familiarity and knowledge.

You can better understand how effective your advertising campaigns are, and which channels (mobile, website, or TV, for example) are most effective when you follow up your unaided and aided awareness questions with specific questions about how participants heard about your specific brand. You can then attribute a higher or lower brand awareness to different campaigns. For example, if participants report higher awareness through a Facebook ad, you know how effective that ad was.

tip Always measure awareness separately for different customer segments. In the awareness survey, have participants select which customer segment best describes them and then analyze the awareness separately. You may find significant difference in awareness by geography, age, or gender, for example.

Measuring Brand Attitude

As you progress through the hierarchy of effects, it’s important to measure the current ideas, beliefs, and associations that customers have toward a brand and product. Brand attitude is both what customers think and how strongly they feel. They may be completely familiar with your product, but may have an unfavorable — or at best, neutral — attitude.

To measure brand attitude and its strength, have a representative set of prospective customers rate how much they agree or disagree toward a number of statements that go from general to specific concepts, as shown in Figure 8-2.

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Figure 8-2: Customers can rate specific features of a brand.

tip A rating scale with 5, 7, or 11 points is common, but if your organization uses another scale with a different set of points, use that.

In most branding studies, you should ask about brand favorability for the product and a set of competitors. For example:

· On a scale from 1 to 7, how would you describe your overall attitude toward the following airlines?

· American Airlines

· Delta

· United Airlines

· Southwest

Identifying brand pillars

After asking general questions about brand satisfaction, ask specific questions about characteristics associated with the brand, product, or experience. These are typically called brand pillars (think of pillars holding up a house). Brand pillars are the most important attributes and principles you want to communicate through your brand. While these differ depending on the industry and brand, they usually revolve around the following traits:

· Value: How much value customers feel for the amount of money they spend on the products.

· Quality: How well customers think a product is built, including the type of materials and process.

· Trust: Do customers feel like their data is safe, or that the company will deliver what it says?

After participants rate their satisfaction on brand attributes, have them also describe, in their own words, how they arrived at their rating. This is an excellent opportunity to collect insights both on the key drivers of satisfaction (see later in this chapter) and what you can do to improve the product attributes and brand perception.

Checking brand affinity

A brand affinity analysis identifies the words customers associate with your brand and experience. These attributes can be manipulated or neglected. It’s usually the job of the marketing team to work on getting the right positive associations with the brand.

Think of the toothpaste you use. What words come to mind? Maybe it’s something like

Good Attributes

Bad Attributes

Clean

Expensive

Fresh

Messy

White

Tastes Terrible

Healthy

Guilt

To measure what terms customers associate with your brand and product, use the same framework I describe throughout this chapter:

1. Ask customers which words come to mind when they think of a product or brand.

Have them list as many as they can.

2. Count the responses to see what terms are most common.

3. Provide a list of specific words you want or don’t want associated with a brand and have customers pick from that list.

For example, customers were presented with 24 terms — 12 positive and 12 negative — that represented the website experience for an automotive information brand. Figure 8-3 shows that 59% selected “Informative,” and 35% selected “Valuable” and “Convenient.” Fortunately, only a few participants selected negative words. However, approximately one out of every five customers selected “Hard to Navigate” and “Complicated.” This suggests the website experience could use some improvements to make it easier to use.

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Figure 8-3: Words selected in a brand affinity exercise for an automotive information company’s website.

tip When choosing phrases to present to customers, use terms that reflect the brand pillars to see how well these fundamental concepts resonate with customers.

Measuring Usage and Intent

The final stage of the hierarchy of effects is measuring usage — how much a customer has used the product in the past and what the customer plans to do in the future (intent).

Finding out past usage

You need to understand how frequently and how often customers purchase your products and your competitors’ products or services. This provides an overall view of how customers interact with each brand and how strong or weak the relationship is for different customer segments. For example, in a study of airline and travel website usage, customers who recently booked flights online were asked the following questions:

· Which website have you used in the last year to book airfare?

· How frequently per year do you book tickets for business and pleasure?

· Do you belong to the airline loyalty program (for example, United MileagePlus or Southwest Rapid Rewards)?

· Do you own a rewards credit card for the airline?

Understanding how frequently these customers and prospective customers interact with your products allows you to understand how usage is affected by brand attitude, and to some extent, brand awareness.

Measuring future intent

Measuring customer usage with a brand helps describe what’s happened in the past. But of equal importance is what’s likely to happen in the future. Asking customers or prospective customers their future intent helps provide information about awareness and attitude to predict future sales. Examples of future intent questions include the following:

· If you had to make a laptop purchase today, which brand would you choose?

· How likely are you to continue flying on American Airlines?

· How likely are you to recommend Dell laptops to a friend or colleague?

Intent questions can be more sophisticated and combine brand and product questions with questions about pricing and features (see Chapter 13). Asking about customers’ likelihood to recommend is such an important topic that I cover it in detail in Chapter 12.

Understanding the Key Drivers of Attitude

With all the data collected around awareness, attitude, and usage, you need to summarize each question type to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your brand or product. If your brand or product is not known, or only known by a small percentage of prospective consumers, then campaigns to increase awareness will improve customer awareness. See Marketing For Dummies, by Alexander Hiam (Wiley) for ideas on increasing awareness.

If your product and brand is known, you need to understand what’s driving high or low satisfaction ratings. While any number of variables impact customers’ attitudes toward your brand, usually only a few variables, called key drivers, have a disproportionate impact on attitudes. It may be that customers find the product is too expensive for what they get (value), or perhaps customers find the product difficult to use.

The first way to understand the drivers is to examine the comments customers provide in the survey (see Chapter 2 for categorizing verbatim comments). Look for patterns and concrete examples about what customers do and don’t like.

A more sophisticated way of examining key drivers is using a statistical technique called multiple regression analysis (which I also discuss in the appendix). Customers’ attitudes toward brand attributes are often correlated. That is, customers who are satisfied with the quality of a product are often also satisfied with the value and overall brand. Multiple regression analysis examines the correlation between the independent and dependent variables to determine which attributes contribute most to consumers’ overall brand attitude. Seek the help of a statistician to assist you with running a multiple regression analysis. See Chapter 9 for an example using customer satisfaction as the dependent variable in a key driver analysis.

Structuring a Brand Assessment Survey

This chapter covers a lot of ways to measure consumers’ ideas and beliefs about brands. Much of this data can be collected in the same survey, but be aware about how you arrange your questions. For example, by asking unaided questions before aided questions or asking participants to list adjectives before you have them pick from a selection. Also use a survey program that has branching and logic techniques that enable you to direct participants to different questions depending on their previous answer. Some platforms that use these techniques include UserZoom, Qualtrics, and SurveyAnalytics.

Here is one structure for a branding survey that works well.

· Screening questions: Ask qualifying questions (“Have you purchased a car in the last 6 months?”) and key demographic questions (gender, age) to both screen and segment your responses. You only want qualified participants taking your survey.

· Unaided branding: Without prompting participants with any names, ask them to list products or brands that come to mind.

· Aided branding: Ask participants to select which brands they are familiar with among a list of alternatives. Consider adding some distractor brands.

· Brand satisfaction: For brands that participants select as being familiar with, ask them to rate their satisfaction on a rating scale.

· Specific product knowledge: Dig deeper into the product category by asking participants to list the features or attributes that distinguish your product from the competition’s or from other categories. Start with an unaided question (open comments) and then move to an aided question (listing features to select from).

· Brand affinity: For a specific brand, have participants provide the words or concepts that come to mind when thinking about a brand or product. Start with an unaided question (open comments) and then move to an aided question (selecting from a set of positive and negative terms).

· Product satisfaction: Have participants rate how satisfied they are using the key attributes about a product (for example, quality, value, or features).

· Future Intent: Ask participants which product or brand they intend to purchase.