Consumer research in branding

Tulembayev Alizhan

PhD, Business Coach, Consultant

Marketing Director of GRATA Training

Consumer research insights have long played an important role in managerial decision making in many areas of marketing, for example, in the development of advertising, pricing, and channel strategies. Branding involves the process of endowing products and services with the advantages that accrue to building a strong brand (e.g., enhanced loyalty, price premiums, etc.). Branding’s emergence as a management priority has led to a similar need to inform practicing managers of concepts, theories, and guidelines from consumer research to facilitate their brand stewardship.

Marketers are desperate for consumer behavior learnings that will improve their understanding of branding and their design and implementation of brand-building marketing programs. The importance of consumer research to marketing practice has perhaps never been higher as managers struggle to adapt to a fast-changing marketing environment characterized by savvier consumers and increased competition, as well as the decreased effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics and the emergence of new marketing tools.

Consumer brand knowledge relates to the cognitive representation of the brand. Consumer brand knowledge can be defined in terms of the personal meaning about a brand stored in consumer memory, that is, all descriptive and evaluative brand-related information. Researchers have studied consumer brand knowledge for decades, with different areas receiving greater emphasis depending on the dominant research paradigm and thrust of the time.

A number of theories and processes have been proposed to explain how brand leveraging effects might be manifested, for example, source credibility, affect transfer, cognitive consistency, categorization models, and so on. One potentially fruitful research direction is how the various concepts and mechanisms proposed in one area might be relevant and provide insight into other areas. A deeper understanding of how knowledge for a brand and other linked entities interact is thus of paramount importance. Ideally, to provide comparable insight and guidance, an abstract model would be developed that encompassed all the different means of leveraging brand knowledge.

A number of issues come into play in terms of understanding how the three factors above might operate according to the different types of secondary sources of information and the different dimensions of knowledge potentially involved. Understanding transferability, the third causal factor in the leveraging model, is especially critical. Congruity models or other attitude models may be useful, but regardless of which theoretical approach is adopted, a number of different moderating factors should be explored, such as the perceived similarity of the brand and other entity, the manner by which the other entity is linked to the brand (e.g., how explicit, temporal, etc.), the uniqueness of the linkage (e.g., are other entities themselves linked to a few or many other entities), and so on. These moderating factors have many theoretical and practical

Two key areas of consumer research in branding revolve around the creation and representation of brand knowledge. The challenge and opportunity for consumer research in both of these areas is fully appreciating the broad scope and complexity involved. That is, the chief position of this essay is that the multidimensional nature of consumer brand knowledge (in terms of different types of information inconsumer memory) and leveraging (in terms of multiple sources of secondary meaning from a linked entity) must be understood and accounted for to provide the right perspective and backdrop to consumer research into branding.

In an increasingly networked economy, understanding the consumer behavior effects of linking a brand to other entities such as another person, place, thing, or brand is crucial. Marketers must be able to understand how various entities should best be combined, from a consumer brand-knowledge perspective, to create the optimal positioning in the minds of consumers. More broadly, marketers need guidance as to how they can best integrate all of their various marketing activities to assemble the right brand-knowledge structures.

Consumer research can be invaluable in providing such assistance to the extent to which it can provide insights into the interactive effects of brand knowledge and marketing activities. Doing so would seem necessarily to require well thought-out and integrated theories of how brand knowledge should be represented and how brand knowledge changes. Dynamic models toward that goal must reflect the fact that brand knowledge affects consumer response to current marketing activity, which, in turn, potentially changes aspects of that brand knowledge and, therefore, consumer response to any subsequent marketing activity in the future.

Consumer research in branding has the opportunity to contribute in many other ways as well. For example, a topic of obvious importance not addressed in this article is branding effects and consumer choice. Perhaps one of the more intriguing issues here is when consumers use the brand, in effect, as an attribute in making a brand decision. In certain settings, for example, under low involvement when consumers lack motivation, ability, or opportunity, a brand name may be used as a heuristic cue. Understanding the decision rules when such a strategy might be invoked - and more generally how brand names are factored into constructive decision processes - is another fascinating research topic.

Finally, it should be recognized that this essay presented a representation of brand knowledge based largely on cognitive psychology. Important perspectives on branding and brand knowledge obviously can, and have been, gained from other disciplinary viewpoints, for example, anthropological or ethnographic approaches. Part of the challenge in developing mental maps for consumers that accurately reflect their brand knowledge is how best to incorporate multiple theoretical or methodological paradigms.

In conclusion, research in branding can blend practical value with intellectual rigor. Capturing and synthesizing the complexity of brand knowledge and how it changes from, as well as influences, marketing activity provides tremendous challenges and opportunities that can embellish consumer behavior theory and improve brand management practice.

List of used literature:

1. Aaker, Jennifer L. (1997), “Dimensions of Brand Personality,” Journal of Marketing Research, 34 (August), 347–356.

2. Allison, Ralph I. and Kenneth P. Uhl (1964), “Brand Identification and Perception,” Journal of Marketing Research, 1 (August), 80–85.

3. Bettman, James R. (1979), An Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

4. Zaltman, Gerald and Robin Higie Coulter (1995), “Seeing the Voice of the Customer: Metaphor-Based Advertising Research,” Journal of Advertising Research, 35 (4), 35–51.