Mohit Sewak

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The Changing Consumer Perception

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India is poised to become a major Auto hub in the near future. Indian car industry is changing rapidly, so is the mindset of Indian Consumers. We, at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, took an initiative to find out that whether the changing ground realities have also changed the India Auto Consumer’s mindset vis-a-vis their perception of the abilities of various Indian and foreign Auto manufacture to deliver the much sought after attributes in a car.

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We deliberately, instead of taking individual cars, took BRANDS (as we wanted to analyse the brand perception mapping), and let the consumer decide which brand will he buy (Note: It is important to note that in some cases, though a consumer may covet a brand highly e.g. BMW, but might not intend buying it due to many reasons. So we specifically framed question to analyse the purchase intention), and the attributes for which he will go for that particular brand.

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It was surprising to find the changing perception of the consumer towards TATA, especially after it being the proud owner of Jaguar and LR on one hand, and the maker of the worlds smallest, and the most economical economical (& affordable) car Nano on the other.

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There were many more surprising results as well, have a look…

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The Result (Survey Dated 8th Decemper, 2009)

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Attribute Mileage:

Highest: MARUTI- Car people would like to buy the most for its fuel efficiency (eg. NANO).

LOWEST: FORD- Car people are least like to buy it were for its fuel efficiency (mileage).

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Attribute Safety:

Highest: TATA- Car people would like to buy the most for its Safety preparedness.

LOWEST: FORD- Car people are least like to buy it were for its Safety preparedness.

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Attribute Cost:

Highest: TATA- Car people would like to buy the most for its cost effectiveness (eg. NANO).

LOWEST: FORD- Car people are least like to buy it were for its cost (value for money).

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Attribute Comfort:

Highest: FORD- Car people would like to buy the most for its Comfort (e.g. Jaguar).

LOWEST: MARUTI- Car people are least like to buy it were for its Comfort.

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Attribute After Sales Service (Maintenance cost, frequency and accessibility):

Highest: MARUTI- Car people would like to buy the most for its After Sales Service.

LOWEST: TATA- Car people are least like to buy it were for its After Sales Service.

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The Process

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Cars Analyzed

(Survey Question: Which Brand of car will you choose?)

1. Tata
2. Honda
3. Maruti
4. Ford
5. Hyundai

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Attributes Surveyed

(Survey Question: What factor motivates you to buy this brand?)

1. Comfort
2. Safety
3. Mileage
4. Cost (Price)
5. After Sales Service

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Respondents

Number: 114

Age Group: 24 to 35

Education: Graduation and above

Profession: Management Students

Ethnicity: Indians- Representing all states of India

Social Class: Middle class and above

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Analysis Carried Out

Statistical Tool: Correspondence Analysis

Mapping Dimensions: 2

Test: Chi Square

Test Value: 73.897

Test Significance: 0.000

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Available Downloads:

SPSS Output File For the Data Analysis

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Mobile Marketing: The Adidas Case Study

As Adidas cannot spend as much as Nike on marketing communications (Adidas’ annual advertising and  promotional spending is $900 million only, compared with $1.4 billion for Nike), it has adopted more innovative, yet cost-effective, ways of reaching consumers, such as through mobile marketing.

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Between June and November 2004, some researchers held more than 20 hours of interviews with five senior managers at Adidas in Europe to discuss their efforts to incorporate new technologies and media (mobile marketing) within the company’s overall branding and marketing communications strategy.
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The Objectives were:

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1. Exploiting the Capabilities of Mobile Marketing:
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Taking advantage of mobile marketing’s unique capabilities can require substantial resources, but one solution is to partner with a content provider to develop a “personal mobile gateway,” somewhat similar to Apeoplee Computer Inc.’s iTunes, through which iPod users can purchase music recordings over the Web and manage those digital files in their personal libraries.

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2. Using Universal Appeals to Tap Into Global Markets:
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In its efforts to expand its brand across markets, MTV has managed to mix universal appeals with local tastes — a tactic that could be apeopleied to mobile marketing. The prospective purchaser of a luxury car, for example, might also be interested in an exotic vacation getaway, high-end sporting equipment and financial-investment vehicles.

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3. Addressing Privacy Concerns:
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Wireless communications are typically less secure than transmissions over fixed lines, and this raises a number of privacy concerns. In addition, the capability to connect with people continually throughout the day could result in intrusions into people’s private and public spaces.

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4. Aligning Value-Chain Partners:
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In mobile marketing, the value chain can consist of numerous stakeholders. For a company like Adidas, that chain might include back-end hardware supeopleiers (Nokia) and wireless carriers (Vodafone Group of the United Kingdom in Europe and New Jersey-based Verizon Wireless in the United States), specialized interactive and mobile communications firms, content providers (ESPN), traditional advertising agencies, and perhaps even partner brands (MTV). Who, for example, should manage strategy development and execution: the brand itself or one of its upstream value-chain partners?

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5. Integrating the Mobile Platform With Other Media:
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Companies should not treat the mobile platform as a stand-alone medium but rather as one component in an overall marketing strategy that must be integrated with others.

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6. Developing Mobile-Specific Metrics:
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One way to assess the effectiveness of a mobile-marketing campaign is to use traditional Internet measures, such as click-stream activity and the number of registrations, downloads and “pass-alongs.” But additional metrics that are specific to the mobile platform must be developed to fully determine the effectiveness and efficiency of mobile-marketing practices.

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The Role of Mobile Marketing in Branding

Mobile marketing enable brands to achieve three objectives:

The Future of Mobile Marketing:

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The Coming Era of Brand in the Hand Marketing

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Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing

Customer Based Brand Equity

Brand Awareness:

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Brand recognition relates to consumers’ ability to confirm prior exposure to the brand when given the brand as a cue. In other words, brand recognition requires that consumers conectly discriminate the brand as having been seen or heard previously. Brand recall relates to consumers’ ability to retrieve the brand when given the product category, the needs fulfilled by the category, or some other type of probe as a cue.

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Brand Image:

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Brand image is defined here as perceptions about a brand as reflected by the brand associations held in consumer memory. Along with level of abstraction, brand associations can be classified into three major categories of increasing scope: attributes, benefits, and attitudes.

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Attributes are those descriptive features that characterize a product or service—what a consumer thinks the product or service is or has and what is involved with its purchase or consumption.

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Brand attitudes are defined as consumers’ overall evaluations of a brand (Witkie 1986). Brand attitudes are important because they often form the basis for consumer behavior (e.g., brand choice).

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The different types of brand associations making up the brand image include product-related or non-product-related attributes; functional, experiential, or symbolic benefits; and overall brand attitudes.

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These associations can vary according to their favorability, strength, and uniqueness.

Customer-based brand equity is defined as the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand. a brand is said to have positive (negative) customer-based brand equity if consumers react more (less) favorably to the product, price, promotion, or distribution of the brand than they do to the same marketing mix element when it is attributed to a fictitiously named or unnamed version of the product or service.

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Building Customer-Based Brand Equity:

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Building customer-based brand equity requires the creation of a familiar brand that has favorable, strong, and unique brand associations. This can be done both through the initial choice of the brand identities, such as the brand name, logo, or symbol, and through the integration of the brand identities into the supporting marketing program.

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Developing supporting marketing programs:

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Marketing programs are designed to enhance brand awareness and establish favorable, strong, and unique brand associations in memory so that consumers purchase the product or service. Brand awareness is related to brand familiarity.

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Measuring Customer-Based Brand Equity:

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There are two basic approaches to measuring customer based brand equity. The “indirect” approach attempts to assess potential sources of customer-based brand equity by measuring brand knowledge (i.e., brand awareness and brand image). The “direct” approach attempts to measure customer-based brand equity more directly by assessing the impact of brand knowledge on consumer response to different elements of the firm’s marketing program. The indirect and direct approaches to measuring customer-based brand equity are complementary and should be used together.

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Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity:

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• 1.  marketers should adopt a broad view of marketing decisions.
• 2. marketers should define the knowledge structures that they would like to create in the minds of consumers—that is, by specifying desired levels of awareness and favorability, strength, and uniqueness of product- and non-product-related attributes; functional, experiential, and symbolic benefits; and overall attitudes.
• 3. marketers should evaluate the increasingly large number of tactical options available to create these knowledge structures, especially in terms of various marketing communication alternatives.
• 4. marketers should take a long-term view of marketing decisions.
• 5. marketers should employ tracking studies to measure consumer knowledge structures over time to: -

• (1) detect any changes in the different dimensions of brand knowledge and
• (2) suggest how these changes might be related to the effectiveness of different marketing mix actions.

• 6. They  should evaluate potential extension candidates for their viability and possible feedback effects on core brand image.

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Conclusions:

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• 1. First, factors influencing the favorability, strength, and uniqueness of brand associations, a focus of much past
• research, should continue to be explored, but along several different lines.
• 2. the costs and benefits of leveraging secondary associations should be explored. For example, how and under what conditions should a firm increase the salience of source factors related to the brand (i.e.,  the company, country of origin, and distribution channel)?
• 3. One important research priority is to develop valid benchmarks for the direct approach to measuring customer-based brand equity—that is, plausible descriptions of the relevant activity (advertising, promotion, product, pricing, etc.) with no or fictitious brand identification.
• 4.  Finally, broader implications of customer-based brand equity should be explored by considering aggregation
• issues associated with brand knowledge effects on market segments or the customer franchise as a whole, as opposed to effects on an individual consumer.

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Better Advertising Planning Grid

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The article “Better Advertising Planning Grid”, by John Rossiter, and Larry Percy, says that the manager now needs a more comprehensive model which accounts for the major differences in how ads work depending on the advertising situation. Purpose in this article is to present and discuss a newer and improved alternative advertising planning grid based on the work of Rossiter and Percy (1987), which we call the Rossiter-Percy Grid.

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These sections discuss:

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(1) Brand awareness as a necessary precursor to brand attitude;

(2) the involvement dimension of brand attitude;

(3) the motivational di-mension of brand attitude;

(4) advertising tactics based on the grids; and

(5) theoretical extensions of the Rossiter-Percy Grid.

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Article mainly criticizes FCB grid on various parameters and explains why Rossiter-Percy grid is better.

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The areas of contentions are:

Brand Awareness as a necessary precursor to Brand Attitude

The Rossiter-Percy Grid posits brand awareness as a necessary communication objective for advertising, prior to brand attitude. Brand attitude without prior brand awareness is an insufficient advertising communication objective. Various other devices, such as bizarre

executions and jingles, are also recommended for specific types of advertising where they may be appropriate to increase brand recall.

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The involvement dimension of Attitude

It is consumer’s level of involvement in making the product or brand choice. FGB conceptualization of involvement is inadequate on atleast three counts.

Firstly, a consumer could be quite an experienced buyer of the product category such that it has become low involvement, yet become highly involved when a new brand enters the category. The second problem with the FGB conceptualization of involvement is that it confuses product-category involvement with various brands’ involvement. Third problem with the FCB conceptualization of involvement is that involvement is seen as a continuum, despite the dichotomous-looking diagram they use to portray their grid.

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Motivational Dimension of Attitude

Product or brand attitudes are distinguished not only by the level of involvement in making the choice but also by the purchase motive which caused the attitude to be formed initially. Qualitative researchers spend a good deal of their time trying to identify purchase motives, and advertising agencies, too, are always seeking these “triggers to action.”

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The FCB Grid’s classification of “think-feel” does not allow for differences between product-category and brand-purchase motivations.

FCB matrix considers think and feel as the 2 primary factors motivating purchase, but there are so many other parameters too. Rossiter-Percy grid gives wide array including informational and transformational motivators. A further difficulty with the FCB approach, and with that of many other writers who have focused on “emotions” and “feelings,” is that the writers tend almost always to be referring to positive emotions or feelings when they use these terms. Yet another difficulty with the motivational dimension in the FCB Grid concerns measurement.

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A final criticism of the FCB Grid’s conceptualization of the “think-feel” dimension is that it correlates highly positively with the “involvement” dimension.

The Rossiter-Percy model allows product-category purchase motives and brand purchase motives to differ, whereas the FCB approach does not. Rossiter and Percy’s model identifies eight operatively distinct purchase motives, in comparison with the FCB model which distinguishes only one “think” motive and several “feel” motives and cannot measure the obviously important motive of social approval.

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FCB grid doesn’t tell advertisers what they should do once they identify the quadrant.

The low-involvement tactics tend to focus on just one or two benefits as in the typical consumer packaged-goods (“USP”) type of approach. On the other hand, the high-involvement tactics tend to focus on the multiple-benefits type of approach which characterizes the carefully considered comparative decisions.

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Overall, therefore, a further advantage of the Rossiter-Percy Grid is that it can accommodate other theoretical constructs in consumer decision-making and advertising.

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