BrainTrust Query: Is Brand Awareness a Useful Research Measure in an Era of Digital and Shopper Marketing?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt from a current article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research Consulting blog.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with measuring brand awareness, especially aided awareness (i.e., "Have you ever heard of a brand called ..."). Aided awareness is a good measure when a brand is healthy and can be used to compare progress across markets. However, it becomes a useless measure when a brand declines.
I remember being at Unilever in the late 70's and seeing really high aided awareness levels for some brands that once were leaders but had since dwindled to tiny shares (Pepsodent and Lifebuoy, to name two; the reader probably is still aware of them today -- admit it!).
In an era of shopper marketing and Procter's call for store-back thinking, CPG marketers want to know how to get their brands noticed at retail. That means the brand broke through the clutter and became relevant to that shopper at that moment; it got in the game. It could even mean that a shopper became instantly aware of your brand and bought it. That is shelf-back thinking!
Getting noticed at retail is not a no-brainer; it is hard and requires great marketing. John Dranow from Smart Revenue says the first thing a shopper does on a given trip is deselect 90 percent of what's in the store. The 90 percent of products that are deselected are like the gorilla in the video with kids bouncing basketballs. You are so intent on counting the number of passes by those kids in white shirts amidst the chaos, you don't see the person in the gorilla suit. "Inattentional blindness" is the name of the phenomenon and it happens to shoppers on every shopping trip.
What a marketer should want from their communications efforts is to make their brand relevant to break through the chaos. Create anticipation, curiosity, meaning, and desire pursuant to actions like getting people talking, searching, visiting your owned media sites, looking for your brand at retail and ultimately buying it. Post-purchase, media can help guide the experience consumers are having with the product and getting them to want to replenish as they run out.
Literally, awareness is a survey construct that measures the ability of a respondent to retrieve a brand memory during survey questioning regardless of whether or not the product category was relevant to their lives at the moment they clicked the link. In contrast, what CPG marketers really want to know is how to make the retail experience evoke a brand memory and create meaning while someone is shopping -- further, what communications approaches best accomplish that given the path to purchase for their product.
If marketing research wants greater impact on marketing decision-making -- if it is to get that seat at the table -- it has to start measuring what the business really needs to know.
Discussion Questions: How relevant is aided brand awareness as a research measure in an era of digital and shopper marketing? What additional challenges do marketers have in looking to measure brand connectivity at the retail level?