Module 3: MEASURING AND

INTERPRETING
BRAND PERFORMANCE
 7. DEVELOPING A BRAND EQUITY MEASUREMENT AND
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

8. MEASURING SOURCES OF BRAND EQUITY: CAPTURING CUSTOMER

MINDSET
Learning Objectives
 Describe the new accountability in terms of ROMI (Return of
Marketing Investment)
 Outline the two steps in conducting a brand audit
 Describe how to design, conduct, and interpret a tracking
study
 Identify the steps in implementing a brand equity
management system
Preview
• We are taking a detailed look at what consumers know and feel about and act
toward brands and how marketers can develop measurement procedures to
assess how well their brands are doing.
• The customer-based brand equity (CBBE) concept provides guidance about how
we can measure brand equity.
• Given that customer-based brand equity is the differential effect that knowledge
about the brand has on customer response to the marketing of that brand, two
basic approaches to measuring brand equity present themselves.
• An indirect approach can assess potential sources of customer-based brand
equity by identifying and tracking consumers’ brand knowledge—all the
thoughts, feelings, images, perceptions, and beliefs linked to the brand.
• A direct approach, on the other hand, can assess the actual impact of brand
knowledge on consumer response to different aspects of the marketing program.
Preview
• The two approaches are complementary,
and marketers can and should use both.
• In other words, for brand equity to provide
a useful strategic function and guide
marketing decisions, marketers must fully:
• understand the sources of brand equity,
• how they affect outcomes of interest such as
sales, and
• how these sources and outcomes change, if at
all, over time.
Preview
• Before we get into specifics of measurement, we offer some big-picture
perspectives of how to think about brand equity measurement and
management.
• Specifically, we’ll consider how to develop and implement a brand equity
measurement system.
• A brand equity measurement system is a set of research procedures
designed to provide marketers with timely, accurate, and actionable
information about brands so they can make the best possible tactical
decisions in the short run and strategic decisions in the long run.
• The goal is to achieve a full understanding of the sources and outcomes
of brand equity and to be able to relate the two as much as possible.
THE NEW ACCOUNTABILITY
 Although senior managers at many firms have embraced the
marketing concept and the importance of brands, they often
struggle with questions such as:
 How strong is our brand?
 How can we ensure that our marketing activities create value?
 How do we measure that value?
 Conducting Brand Audits
 Brand Inventory
 Brand Exploratory
 Brand Positioning and the Supporting Marketing Program
THE NEW ACCOUNTABILITY
• Virtually every marketing dollar spent today must be justified as both
effective and efficient in terms of return of marketing investment
(ROMI).
• This increased accountability has forced marketers to address tough
challenges and develop new measurement approaches.
• Measuring the long-term value of marketing in terms of both its full
short-term and long-term impact on consumers is thus crucial for
accurately assessing return on investment.
• Clearly marketers need new tools and procedures that clarify and justify
the value of their expenditures, beyond ROMI measures tied to short-
term changes in sales.
CONDUCTING BRAND AUDITS
• Brand audit: Comprehensive examination of a brand to discover its
sources of brand equity.
• An audit is a systematic inspection by an outside firm of accounting
records including analyses, tests, and confirmations.
• Firms – what products and services are currently being offered to
consumers and how are they marked and branded?
• Consumers – what deeply held perceptions and beliefs create the true
meaning of brands and products?
CONDUCTING BRAND AUDITS
• Important questions:
• Are the current sources of brand equity satisfactory?
• Do certain brand associations need to be added,
subtracted, or just strengthened?
• What brand opportunities exist and what potential
challenges exist for brand equity?
CONDUCTING BRAND AUDITS
• Marketing audit: a 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.
• Internal, company-focused exercise to make sure marketing
operations are efficient and effective.
• agreement on objectives, scope, and approach
• data collection
• report preparation and presentation
CONDUCTING BRAND AUDITS
• The brand audit consists of two steps: the brand inventory and the
brand exploratory. We’ll discuss each in turn.
• Brand Focus 8.0 illustrates a sample brand audit using the Rolex brand
as an example.
Brand Inventory

• Comprehensive profile of how all the products and

services of a company are marketed and branded
• Profiling requires marketers to catalogue:
• Visual and written form for each product or service sold
(the names, logos, symbols, characters, packaging,
slogans, or other trademarks used)
• The inherent product attributes or characteristics of the
brand
• Pricing, communications, and distribution policies
Brand Inventory

• Helps understand consumers’ perceptions

• Provides analysis and useful insights into how
brand equity may be better managed
• Reveals the extent of brand consistency and
lack of perceived differences among different
products sharing the brand name
• Helps uncover undesirable redundancy and
overlap that could lead to consumer
confusion or retailer resistance.
Brand Exploratory
• Research directed to understanding what consumers think and feel
about the brand and act toward it in order to better understand
sources of brand equity as well as any possible barriers.
Brand Exploratory
• Preliminary Activities
• First, dig through company archives to uncover reports that may have
been buried, and perhaps even long forgotten, but that contain
insights and answers to a number of important questions or suggest
new questions that may still need to be posed.
• Second, interview internal personnel to gain an understanding of their
beliefs about consumer perceptions for the brand and competitive
brands.
• Past and current marketing managers may be able to share some wisdom not
necessarily captured in prior research reports.
Brand Exploratory
• Although these preliminary activities are useful, additional research is
often required to better understand how customers shop for and use
different brands and what they think and feel about them.
• To allow marketers to cover a broad range of issues and to pursue
some in greater depth, the brand exploratory often employs
qualitative research techniques as a first step, as summarized in
Figure 8-2, followed by more focused and definitive survey-based
quantitative research.
Interpreting Qualitative Research

• Criteria. Levy identifies three criteria by which we can classify and

judge any qualitative research technique: direction, depth, and
diversity
• For example, any projective research technique varies in terms of the
nature of the stimulus information (is it related to the person or the
brand?), the extent to which responses are superficial and concrete as
opposed to deeper and more abstract (and thus requiring more
interpretation), and the way the information relates to information
gathered by other projective techniques.
Interpreting Qualitative Research

• In Figure 8-2, the tasks at the top of the left-hand list ask very specific
questions whose answers may be easier to interpret.
• The tasks on the bottom of the list ask questions that are much richer
but also harder to interpret.
• Tasks on the top of the right-hand list are elaborate exercises that
consumers undertake themselves and that may be either specific or
broadly directed.
• Tasks at the bottom of the right-hand list consist of direct observation
of consumers as they engage in various behaviors.
Interpreting Qualitative Research

• According to Levy, the more specific the question, the narrower the range of
information given by the respondent.
• When the stimulus information in the question is open-ended and responses
are freer or less constrained, the respondent tends to give more information.
• The more abstract and symbolic the research technique, however, the more
important it is to follow up with probes and other questions that explicitly
reveal the motivation and reasons behind consumers’ responses.
• Ideally, qualitative research conducted as part of the brand exploratory
should vary in direction and depth as well as in technique.
• The challenge is to provide accurate interpretation— going beyond what
consumers explicitly state to determine what they implicitly mean.
Interpreting Qualitative Research

• Mental Maps and Core Brand Associations. One useful outcome of

qualitative research is a mental map.
• A mental map accurately portrays in detail all salient brand
associations and responses for a particular target market.
• One of the simplest means to get consumers to create a mental map
is to ask them for their top-of-mind brand associations (“When you
think of this brand, what comes to mind?”).
• The brand resonance pyramid from Chapter 3 helps to highlight some
of the types of associations and responses that may emerge from the
creation of a mental map.
Interpreting Qualitative Research

• It is sometimes useful to group brand associations into related categories with

descriptive labels.
• Core brand associations are those abstract associations (attributes and benefits)
that characterize the 5–10 most important aspects or dimensions of a brand.
• They can serve as the basis of brand positioning in terms of how they create
points-of-parity and points-of-difference.
• For example, in response to a Nike brand probe, consumers may list LeBron
James, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, or Lance Armstrong, whom we could call
“top athletes.” The challenge is to include all relevant associations while making
sure each is as distinct as possible.
• Figure 8-3 displays a hypothetical mental map and some core brand associations
for MTV.
Conducting Quantitative Research
• Qualitative research is suggestive, but a more definitive assessment of the depth and
breadth of brand awareness and the strength, favorability, and uniqueness of brand
associations often requires a quantitative phase of research.
• The guidelines for the quantitative phase of the exploratory are relatively straightforward.
• Marketers should assess all potentially salient associations identified by the qualitative
research phase according to their strength, favorability, and uniqueness.
• They should examine both specific brand beliefs and overall attitudes and behaviors to
reveal potential sources and outcomes of brand equity.
• And they should assess the depth and breadth of brand awareness by employing various
cues.
• Typically, marketers will also need to conduct similar types of research for competitors to
better understand their sources of brand equity and how they compare with the target
brand.
Conducting Quantitative Research
• Much of the above discussion of qualitative and quantitative measures has
concentrated on associations to the brand name—for example, what do consumers
think about the brand when given its name as a probe?
• Marketers should study other brand elements in the brand exploratory as well, because
they may trigger other meanings and facets of the brand.
• For instance, we can ask consumers what inferences they make about the brand on the
basis of the product packaging, logo, or other attribute alone, such as, “What would
you think about the brand just on the basis of its packaging?” We can explore specific
aspects of the brand elements—for example, the label on the package or the shape of
the package itself—to uncover their role in creating brand associations and thus
sources of brand equity.
• We should also determine which of these elements most effectively represents and
symbolizes the brand as a whole.
Brand Positioning and the Supporting Marketing Program

• Moving from the current brand image to the desired brand image
typically means adding new associations, strengthening existing ones,
or weakening or eliminating undesirable ones in the minds of
consumers
• Ideal brand positioning aims to achieve congruence between:
• What customers currently believe about the brand
• What customers will value in the brand
• What the firm is currently saying about the brand
• Where the firm would like to take the brand
Brand Positioning and the Supporting
Marketing Program
• John Roberts, one of Australia’s top marketing academics, sees the challenge
in achieving the ideal positioning for a brand as being able to achieve
congruence among four key considerations:
• (1) what customers currently believe about the brand (and thus find
credible),
• (2) what customers will value in the brand,
• (3) what the firm is currently saying about the brand, and
• (4) where the firm would like to take the brand (see Figure 8-5)
• Because each of the four considerations may suggest or reflect different
approaches to positioning, finding a positioning that balances the four
considerations as much as possible is key.
Brand Charter (or Brand Bible)

• Formalizes the company view of brand equity into a document

• Provides relevant guidelines to marketing managers and key
marketing partners
• Should be updated on an annual basis to provide decision makers
with a current brand profile
Brand Charter

• Define the firm’s view of branding and brand equity and explain why it is important.
• Describe the scope of key brands.
• Specify what the actual and desired equity is for brands at all relevant levels of the
brand hierarchy.
• Explain how brand equity is measured in terms of the tracking study and the resulting
brand equity report.
• Suggest how marketers should manage brands with some general strategic guidelines,
stressing clarity, consistency, and innovation in marketing thinking over time.
• Outline how to devise marketing programs along specific tactical guidelines.
• Specify the proper treatment of the brand in terms of trademark usage, design
considerations, packaging, and communications.
Contents

• A brand equity report should describe:

• What is happening with the brand?
• Why is it happening?
• Should include more descriptive market-level information.
• Product shipments and movement through channels of distribution
• Retail category trends
• Relevant cost breakdowns
• Price and discount schedules where appropriate
• Sales and market share information broken down by relevant factors (such as
geographic region, type of retail account, or customer)
• Profit assessments
Overseeing brand equity

• To provide central coordination, the firm should:

• Establish a position responsible for overseeing the implementation of
the brand charter and brand equity reports.
• Ensure that product and marketing actions across divisions and
geographic boundaries reflect their spirit as closely as possible.
• Maximize the long-term equity of the brand.
Organizational design and structures

• Firms may attempt to redesign their marketing organizations to better

reflect the challenges faced by their brands.
• To meet the challenges of changing job requirements and duties,
traditional marketing departments may be replaced by business
groups, multidisciplinary teams, and so on.
• New organizational structure aims to improve internal coordination
and efficiencies as well as external focus on retailers and consumers.
Managing marketing partners

• Performance of a brand is also dependent on the actions taken by

outside suppliers and marketing partners.
• Global trend indicates that firms are increasingly consolidating their
marketing partnerships and reducing the number of their outside
suppliers.
To Sum up...

• The company view of brand equity should be formalized into a

document
• The results of the tracking surveys should be assembled into a brand
equity report
• Senior management must be assigned to oversee brand equity within
the organization
2. MEASURING SOURCES OF
BRAND EQUITY: CAPTURING
CUSTOMER MINDSET
Learning Objectives

• Describe effective qualitative research techniques for tapping into

consumer brand knowledge
• Identify effective quantitative research techniques for measuring
brand awareness, image, responses, and relationships
• Profile and contrast some popular brand equity models
Free Associations

• 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
Projective Techniques

• 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
Word Association

• In word association, respondents are presented with a list of words,

one at a time and asked to respond to each with the first word that
comes to mind. The words of interest, called test words, are
interspersed throughout the list which also contains some neutral, or
filler words to disguise the purpose of the study. Responses are
analyzed by calculating:
1) the frequency with which any word is given as a response;
2) the amount of time that elapses before a response is given; and
3) the number of respondents who do not respond at all to a test
word within a reasonable period of time.
Completion

• In Sentence completion, respondents are given incomplete sentences and asked to complete
them. Generally, they are asked to use the first word or phrase that comes to mind.
• A person who shops at H&M is ______________________

• A person who receives a gift certificate good for Sak's Fifth Avenue would be
__________________________________

• Lacoste is most liked by _________________________

• When I think of shopping in a department store, I ________

• A variation of sentence completion is paragraph completion, in which the respondent completes

a paragraph beginning with the stimulus phrase.
Completion

• In story completion, respondents are given part of a story –

enough to direct attention to a particular topic but not to hint
at the ending.
• They are required to give the conclusion in their own words.

• John is standing before the counter with milk in the supermarket. He

is confused by the variety of choice. His friend comes up. He has a
packet of milk in his hands. John asks for his friend's advice. His friend
shows him a packet of milk with Omega 3 but John doesn't know
what Omega 3 is. His friends recommends him to try. Then, John...
Construction

• With a picture response, the respondents are asked to describe a

series of pictures of ordinary as well as unusual events. The
respondent's interpretation of the pictures gives indications of that
individual's personality.
• In cartoon tests, cartoon characters are shown in a specific situation
related to the problem. The respondents are asked to indicate what
one cartoon character might say in response to the comments of
another character. Cartoon tests are simpler to administer and
analyze than picture response techniques.
Projective Questioning

• The respondent is presented with a verbal or visual situation and the

respondent is asked to relate the beliefs and attitudes of a third
person rather than directly expressing personal beliefs and attitudes.
This third person may be a friend, neighbor, colleague, or a “typical”
person.
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET)

• Uncovers hidden thoughts and feelings which can be expressed using

metaphors
• Elicits interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior
• Construct- An abstraction to capture common ideas or themes
expressed by customers
• Metaphor
• Defining one thing in terms of another, [which] people can use . . . to
represent thoughts that are tacit, implicit, and unspoken
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET)

• Storytelling: exploring individual visual metaphors

• Expand the frame: expanding the metaphoric meaning of images
• Sensory metaphor: eliciting metaphors about the research topic from
each sensory modality
• Vignette: using the mind’s eye to create a short story about the
research topic
• Digital image: integrating the images to create visual summary of the
research topic
Brand Personality and Values

• Brand personality - Human characteristics or traits that consumers can

attribute to a brand
• If the brand were to come alive as a person, what would it be like? What
would it do? Where would it live? What would it wear? Who would it
talk to if it went to a party (and what would it talk about)?
• The big five-brand personality scale used to measure:
• Sincerity
• Excitement
• Competence
• Sophistication
• Ruggedness
Ethnographic and Experiential Methods

• Use “thick description” based on participant

observation
• Extract and interpret the deep cultural meaning of
events and activities
• Example: L’Oreal
To Sum up...

• Qualitative research techniques ascertain consumer

perceptions that are difficult to uncover
• Disadvantages
• Small sample size may not necessarily generalize to broader
populations
• Due to qualitative nature, data is open to varied interpretations
Quantitative Research Techniques
• Brand Awareness

• Brand Image

• Brand Responses

• Brand Relationships
Brand Awareness

• Related to the strength of the brand in memory, as reflected by

consumers’ ability to identify various brand elements like the brand
name, logo, symbol, character, packaging, and slogan under different
conditions.
• Recognition
• Recall
• 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
Brand Image

• Associations that consumers hold for a brand

• Useful for marketers to make a distinction between:
• Lower-level considerations (performance and imagery) and higher-level
considerations (judgements and feelings)
• Beliefs: Descriptive thoughts that a person holds about something
• Multidimensional scaling (MDS)
Brand Image

1. What are the strongest associations you have to the brand? What
comes to mind when you think of the brand? (Strength)
2. What is good about the brand? What do you like about the brand?
What is bad about the brand? What do you dislike about the brand?
(Favorability)
3. What is unique about the brand? What characteristics or features
does the brand share with other brands? (Uniqueness)
Behavioral loyalty

• To capture reported brand usage and behavioural loyalty

marketers can:
• Ask consumers their past purchase history and future purchase
intentions.
• Make their measures open ended.
• Force consumers to choose one of two brands.
• Offer multiple choice or rating scales.
Behavioral loyalty

Category – Batteries → brand Duracell

• Which brand of [category] do you usually buy?

• Which brand of [category] did you buy last time?
• Do you have any [category] on hand? Which brand?
• Which brands of [category] did you consider buying?
• Which brand of [category] will you buy next time?
Attitudinal attachment

• Can be defined in the terms of the following underlying

constructs
• Brand-self connections
• Connected: “To what extent do you feel that you are personally connected to
(Brand)?”
• Part of Who You Are: “To what extent is (Brand) part of you and who you are?”
• Brand prominence
• Automatic: “To what extent are your thoughts and feelings towards (Brand)
often automatic, coming to mind seemingly on their own?”
• Naturally: “To what extent do your thoughts and feelings towards (Brand) come
to you naturally and instantly?”
11 Dimensions of Brand Love

1. Passion (for the brand).

2. Duration of the relationship (the relationship with the brand exists for a long time).
3. Self-congruity (congruity between self-image and product image).
4. Dreams (the brand favors consumer dreams).
5. Memories (evoked by the brand).
6. Pleasure (that the brand provides to the consumer).
7. Attraction (feel toward the brand).
8. Uniqueness (of the brand and/or of the relationship).
9. Beauty (of the brand).
10. Trust (the brand has never disappointed).
11. Declaration of affect (feel toward the brand).
Sense of community

 Social currency - The extent to which people share the brand or

information about the brand as part of their everyday social lives at
work or at home.
Active engagement

• Extent to which consumers are willing to invest their resources of

time, energy, and money on the brand beyond those resources
expended during purchase or consumption of the brand.
Fournier’s brand relationship research

• Six main facets of Brand Relationship Quality (BRQ):

• Interdependence

• Self-concept connection

• Commitment

• Love/passion

• Intimacy

• Partner quality