Brand Building:
Power in the Mind and Commitment Measurement
Beyond Preference: Conversion Model™
Jeni Lee Chapman
Executive Vice President
Brand & Communications Division
The Brand as a Relationship Platform – A Strategic View
Most conceptualizations of “brand” start out from a narrow “brand as product” focus, and broaden out from there in a number of ways (see Keller and Lehman, 2004 for examples). Our experience for more than a decade in this area has shown us that this view is too restrictive, and is part of the reason why brand research has been so unfocused.
From our experience working with brands over the years, we believe that a brand is essentially a relationship platform. TNS defines the relationship between an organization and its key constituencies this way: the brand is how organizations “touch” all audiences, and through brands, a company’s business strategy comes to life among different constituencies (which could be external to the company, e.g. customers, financial analysts, or internal to the company, e.g. employees).
Why is Understanding Brand Power in the Mind Important?
Strong brands have been shown to provide valuable financial rewards to companies and are even part of the balance sheet as an “asset” in many organizations.
Why? Because brands with strong customer relationships have been shown to be less vulnerable to competitor offerings. In addition, customers with strong attachment to a brand are more likely to repeat the experience with that brand; committed or “attached” customers will give you more of their business; surely a desirable and tangible business result. In addition, how brands are perceived when it comes to “distribution” i.e. supply is critical as well.
Creating Changes in the Overall Attitudes towards a Brand – A Case Study
One of the measures you will find in most measurement frameworks (see Aaker 1996 and Keller 2003) is the concept of attitudinal change – i.e. increasing awareness, shifting imagery in line with strategy, to changes in overall attitudes towards the brand (consideration or preference) and finally to brand equity or brand loyalty.
In the case study presented here, our client had made gains on brand awareness however the lead competitor continued to garner higher unaided brand awareness and saliency. So the question our client needed to answer was: “Are our marketing campaigns and spend having a positive impact on the brand or not”?
Our in-market tracking study demonstrated that among those aware of our client’s brand, our client outperformed the category - in particular among our strategic target of non-category users. Our client created an “attitudinal shift” towards the brand (as measured through preference). While our client had increased preference from 60% to 70%, the lead competitor had softened 5 points among category users. Among the strategic target of non-users, our client had gone from 35% preference to over 50% over 2 years; the lead competitor 35% to 40%.
Beyond Preference: Understanding Brand Commitment – Conversion Model™
A Customer and Marketing Based Perspective
One of the ways we have been able to better understand the implications of “growing strong preference” and how it connects to brand equity is through a better understanding of the differences between loyalty and commitment. Case in point is that while the lead competitor has greater brand awareness, when you compare their users to our clients users; we see that our clients customers are much more “committed” to the brand. This explains why our preference measure is so much higher than the lead competitor.
Through the work we are doing in marketing research, we have been looking at Commitment as a better measure of equity and a better segmentation tool than loyalty for understanding our customer base in terms of their attachment to our brand and competitors. The main difference between the two concepts is that loyalty measures what people do; it looks at purchase and re-purchase behavior and attitudes; however we have all heard of “loyal” customers changing brands when another offering is made available.
Commitment allows us to understand the “quality” of the loyalty we are building among our customers. A strong brand needs more than loyal customers for long term growth and profitability, it needs a strong base of committed customers. If your customers are committed, they believe that what you have to offer and what you deliver is truly better than the competition. This in turn makes them much less vulnerable to accepting or even “listening” to competitive offerings.
Through commitment we are essentially measuring the extent to which we are building a healthy relationship with our customers. A healthy relationship is essential to long term growth and to the ability to get a greater share of “new category users” as well as a greater share of experiences among category users – i.e. get the most share of wallet we can within each of these constituencies.
Executive Summary
The work we have done in understanding brand health through commitment clearly showed our client that:
- One of the healthiest brands in the category, having built strong power in the mind/equity and commitment.
- That there continues to be untapped opportunities for the brand to better maximize its strong “mind” share -in part by focusing on strategies to help the brand’s opportunities for selection at time of purchase or when gathering information.
- That there were portfolio opportunities for the company overall. For example, among our client users who are not committed to the client’s brand, we find that a high percentage prefer another brand within the company’s portfolio. By creating marketing programs that allow us to get a higher share of category users among our different products the company’s overall results can be maximized.
For more information, please email tnsbcdinfo@tns-global.com. |
