Download Understanding Brand Preference to build a better marketing strategy

Thoughts
Reflexion and Analysis for the Indian Market
May 2016
Understanding Brand Preference to build a better
marketing strategy
Foreword
There has been a long standing interest from marketers to understand how consumers
form their preferences toward a specific brand. Brand preference is closely related to
brand choice that can facilitate consumer decision making and activate brand purchase.
Knowing the pattern of consumer preferences across the population is a critical input
for designing and developing innovative marketing strategies. It also uncovers the
heterogeneity of consumer choices leading to efficient market segmentation strategies.
However, forecasting consumer’s preferences between brands is not an easy task.
Most of the early models focused on brand attributes in preference construction. Thus
the evolving marketing strategies focus on analysing and communicating information
about product attributes.
Although these cognitive responses derived from beliefs about brand attributes are
important in building preferences, there are other emotional responses, social
influences that can influence brand preferences.
It is demonstrated that consumers can have an already established preference and refer
to the brand attributes that confirm their preferences. In addition, this traditional
cognitive view that deemed consumer as rational decision making had been shifted to
the experiential view focuses on the emotional, cognitive, symbolic responses of
consumption. This shift echoed the changes that companies have moved from focusing
on attributes and features toward creating experiences to their consumers.
Brands are no longer bundles of functional characteristic but are means of providing
experiences. Moreover, these experiences were hypothesised to be an important driver
in building brand preferences.
The influence of brand preference on brand image transfer
The marketer’s principal objective is to reach his/her target group and make more than
a single sale. However, consumers almost always approach the marketplace with a
well-established set of tastes and preferences. This makes it difficult for new products
to position between the already flooded market demands. This challenge is enhanced
by traditional marketing communication activities such as advertising and sales
promotion, which are faced with the challenges of reaching increasingly fragmented
consumer markets and cutting through an overload of messages aimed at consumers,
which creates media clutter.
“Marketers have been spending more and more to try to get their message out, only to
find their pitches drowned out in a sea of noise generated by countless other marketers
trying to do the same thing” (Freedman, 2005).
Sponsorship is viewed as a means of avoiding this clutter by enabling sponsors to
identify and target well-defined audiences in terms of demographics and lifestyles. In
order for the effect of sponsorship to be maximized, Keller (2003) emphasizes that it is
important to select the right type of events or endorsers to match the brand.
Literature study suggests that sponsorship functions like celebrity endorser advertising.
Companies hire famous athletes and actors in hopes that celebrities’ fans will also
become ‘fans’ of their products or services.
According to McCracken (1989) endorsers can leverage their own popularity to create
positive associations for brands in the minds of consumers. Brand managers are
hoping to transfer this creation of associations to their own product. When a brand is
identified as linked to an endorser or event, consumers may infer that some of the
particular associations or feelings that characterize the celebrity or event may also
characterize the brand. Research of Becker-Olsen & Simmons (2006) showed that
high-fit sponsorships (sponsor partner is perceived as congruent with sponsored event)
can increase brand value, whereas low-fit (sponsor partner is perceived as incongruent
with sponsored event) can dilute brand value.
These findings suggest that the link between brand and event influence the transfer of
image beliefs, and that the perception of congruent sponsorship is the result of an
endorser process in which consumers reinforce, or not, brand image beliefs of a
product.
Influencing Brand Preference
Brand preference is built by listening to consumers and addressing both their
immediate and long-term needs. With those insights now available, retail marketers
can surpass the old goal of delivering the right message at the right time through
preferred channels. Now, they can leverage insights to inform and inspire consumer
action. Retail marketers and consumers are on a new journey together; the goal is to
make it a mutually profitable trip.
Understanding is the first step in engaging consumers, but it alone doesn't build brand
preference. Connecting with consumers on a personal level and helping them
successfully address a need is the root driver of brand preference which, in turn,
presents brands with the opportunity to influence shoppers’ decisions and actions.
To succeed, retailers need to understand that influencing a shopper's brand preference
is a three-legged stool: understand the consumer, decipher intent and enable the
purchase journey.
Today's consumer is in complete control of their purchase journey. Based on their
needs and preferences, they define what constitutes a meaningful brand experience and
determine if a brand is trustworthy. This self-directed approach has forever changed
the rules of brand engagement.
Retailers "know" their shoppers by building deep, data-rich customer profiles of
behavior patterns, preferences and needs. These unified customer profiles drive every
aspect of a brand's marketing strategy; it's the decoder ring to success.
Successful brands use these data-rich customer profiles to drive personalization and
omni-channel engagement campaigns. Personalization means more than using the
shopper's name. It means leveraging behavioral data to mirror the shopper's tone and
preferred channel and type of interaction. Coupled with omni-channel campaigns,
consumers stay engaged for longer periods of time with brands that focus their
interaction strategies on consumers’ intent rather than channel. That means starting
and driving engagement across all channels, not just email.
To keep a meaningful conversation going, it's critical to understand the next step in
consumers’ purchase journeys. Without the ability to accurately decipher intent,
delivering the right message at the right time on the right device to the right person
becomes a guessing game. At every step in the purchase journey, consumers want to
accomplish specific objectives — e.g., identify potential vendors, understand the pros
and cons of products, find out what their peers think, etc.
A brand that can capture and decipher intent has a competitive advantage in enabling
shoppers to more quickly achieve their objective. The more accurately and consistently
a brand identifies and responds to intent, the greater the trust the consumer places in
that brand.
How can brands decipher intent? By linking predictive analytics and a consumer's upto-the-minute universal behavior data variables with rules-based campaigns. Predictive
analytics determine the best degree of fit between a shopper and meta-level purchase
paths based on past customer behaviors and their outcomes.
By linking the "best fit" path with behavior-based data variables, retailers can spot
intent and define campaign rules that effectively engage shoppers in the right next
step. The key is to gain the ability to intelligently interpret universal behavior — i.e., a
holistic understanding of the consumer based on all internal and external data sources,
across all channels and kept current in real time.
Consumers are always looking for information, how to connect with like-minded
peers, and advice on how to solve a problem when something goes wrong. They
expect brands to listen to them regardless of channel and do the heavy lifting to help
them address a need.
Shopper enablement is the most powerful tool in a brand's marketing arsenal. It
connects brand actions directly with the results consumers are trying to achieve. It
turns engagement into a competitive advantage by delivering the right interaction and
content at the right time to the shopper through the best channels.
Armed with data-rich profiles, retailers are engaging shoppers with personalized
content, offers and campaigns that are contextually relevant and timely. Leading
brands know there's a strong correlation between how effectively they help consumers
and building shopper preference for that brand. Helping is the new selling.
The success of this correlation relies on knowing how to decipher consumer intent
accurately. Furthermore, the three key capabilities for deciphering intent and enabling
shoppers are a 360-degree unified customer database, customer intelligence analytics
and sophisticated behavioral targeting. When not used together, they can create a
disconnected experience that does more harm than good. When used in concert, they
can forge a brand experience that makes a lasting — and highly profitable —
impression.
Today's consumers are in control. They define a meaningful brand experience
according to their needs and preferences, and then decide if a brand is trustworthy. If
retail marketers want to make the cut, they need to recognize that this empowerment
has forever changed the rules of brand engagement.
Conclusion
By understanding how brands are consumed as symbols of identities, marketing and
advertising companies must ensure they understand the main attributes that constitute
their target audiences’ self-concepts to develop distinctive and attractive brands that
match those same traits. To ensure that a brand is preferred in untapped markets,
marketers must develop brand images closely matching the self-perceptions of
potential consumers, and should design advertising messages to target their selfconcepts. Additionally, campaigns focused on attracting minority groups should focus
on characteristics consistent with minority cultural identity. Although self-image
congruity and social identity do not guarantee brand preference, crafting messages that
are directed to consumer’s self-concepts streamlines marketing plans to be most
effective.
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