For businesses to thrive in today's fiercely competitive marketplace they need to be the brand consumers prefer or gravitate toward when shopping in a competitive category.
Building strong brand preference takes time and strategy. This comprehensive guide covers how to measure brand preference at any point in time and then use that data to refine future strategies for long-term success.
Table of Contents:
- What is brand preference?
- Why measuring brand preference matters
- Measuring brand preference using Better Brand Health Tracking
- Non-BBHT metrics to consider
- Strategies to enhance brand preference
- Leverage quantilope to measure brand preference
What is brand preference?
Brand preference is the degree to which consumers favor a particular brand over its competitors. It's not just about brand awareness, but also the emotional and rational factors that influence consumer purchase decisions.
A high level of brand preference suggests that consumers are more likely to choose your brand when faced with multiple options, leading to repeat purchases and increased customer lifetime value. It represents the culmination of a positive customer experience, effective marketing, and a brand image that aligns with a target market’s values and needs.
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Why measuring brand preference matters
Understanding and quantifying brand preference is crucial. Primarily, it provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing campaigns, the performance of your brand strategy, and the experience consumers have with your products/services. By measuring and tracking brand preference over time, you can identify actionable areas for growth, optimize your marketing efforts, and allocate resources more effectively.
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The role of brand preference in market growth
A preferred brand holds a significant advantage in capturing and maintaining market share. When consumers consistently prefer and choose your brand, it translates to increased sales, higher revenue, and sustainable growth. Strong brand preference also often leads to customer retention, reducing the need to constantly invest in acquiring new customers. As an added perk, the more customers who prefer your brand, the more brand advocates you have spreading word about your brand and driving authentic referrals, further expanding your potential customer base.
Brand preference vs. brand awareness: Key differences
While brand awareness measures the extent to which consumers recognize your brand name, brand preference goes a step further.
Brand preference assesses the degree to which consumers will actively choose your brand over others when given the opportunity. A brand can have high awareness but low preference, indicating that while people recognize the brand, they don't necessarily favor or reach for it. Brand preference involves a deeper level of engagement, encompassing brand associations, brand perceptions, and the emotional connections consumers have with your brand.
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Measuring brand preference using Better Brand Health Tracking
Compared to traditional brand tracking methods, which heavily focus on brand funnel metrics (awareness, consideration, usage), Better Brand Health Tracking (BBHT) is a much more actionable and detailed way to understand how consumers perceive and interact with your brand.
BBHT studies narrow in on the crucial aspects of brand preference by capturing what brings consumers to shop in a category in the first place (Category Entry Points) and which brands come to mind in those buying scenarios (Mental Availability). Brands who leverage BBHT (like Florida's Natural and Coles) are able to reference intuitive data visualizations to see which Category Entry Points or brand associations they stand out for – or where they fall short. This gives brands a clear path forward on how to market and grow their brand.
Below, we’ll cover specific BBHT key metrics in more detail, exploring how they help measure and understand brand preference.
Key BBHT metrics related to brand preference
Let’s now dive into BBHT’s unique metrics that help brands measure, track, and act on consumer perceptions.
Category Entry Points
Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the cues that prompt or ‘trigger’ a consumer to think about a particular product or service category. These can be things like ‘Going on a vacation’ which might cause a consumer to shop for sunscreen, or ‘Feeling thirsty’ which might cause a consumer to go out and buy a soda.
CEPs can be quite vast. To help brands narrow down appropriate and actionable CEPs, the 7W framework serves as a guide, focusing on ‘Why’, ‘When’, ‘Where’, ‘While’, ‘With Whom’, ‘With What’, and ‘HoW feeling’. To check out some CEPs in an actual study scenario, check out quantilope's BBHT Body Wash dashboard.
Measuring and monitoring CEPs is key, as consumers won’t consider (let alone prefer to buy) your brand if they aren’t even shopping in your brand’s category to begin with. It’s a great starting place for brands who want to measure their overall brand health and preference.
Mental Availability analysis
Mental Availability analysis calculates how easily a brand comes to mind when consumers find themselves in certain CEPs (i.e. when they’re shopping for sunscreen or looking to buy a soda). In those scenarios, ‘mentally available’ brands are the ones that consumers think of - like ‘Banana Boat’ and ‘Neutrogena’ or ‘Coca-Cola’ and ‘Sprite’. Having your brand come to mind in these moments is crucial as it can decide which brand consumers actually purchase in that moment. To understand just how readily your brand comes to mind in your Category, BBHT captures Mental Market Share: one of four key Mental Availability metrics.
- Mental Market Share: Mental Market Share (MMS) describes how 'present' your brand is in consumers' minds, relevant to your competition. MMS strongly correlates (around r = .75 - .9) with actual sales, providing a tangible measure for overall brand preference. Understanding MMS is important for brand preference, as consumers can’t prefer (and subsequently buy) your brand if it’s not coming to mind in those buying situations. The more CEPs your brand is connected to, the more likely it is to be chosen in these buying situations, meaning that a high Mental Market Share often indicates a strong preference for your brand.
Other key metrics of Mental Availability include Mental Penetration (MPen) and Network Size (NS):
- Mental Penetration: Mental Penetration (MPen) measures how many consumers have at least some Mental Availability of a specific brand. MPen is most interesting among non-buyers, as it outlines your brand’s clearest path for growth. If you create just one additional connection with current non-buyers of your brand, your MPen will increase. The more consumers that have at least some Mental Availability of your brand, the more chance you have at building brand preference.
- Network Size: Network Size (NS) captures how broad/varied category associations are for each brand in your category. Generally, the higher your NS, the better. For bigger brands with many associations, the question is usually around which messages they should currently prioritize and which messages / CEPs they can put on a lower rotation for now (“maintain”). Having a large NS means there are more chances for consumers to consider and prefer your brand over others when shopping.
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Non-BBHT metrics to consider
Aside from BBHT studies, businesses can get a pulse of brand preference by measuring similar, related metrics. These can be used in standard brand tracking studies or ad-hoc studies.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): A metric measuring customer satisfaction and advocacy through word-of-mouth references. A high NPS indicates loyal customers (promoters) who are likely to recommend your brand to your others. A low NPS indicates dissatisfied customers (detractors) who would not recommend your brand to others.
- Customer retention: A metric measuring the percentage of customers who continue to do business with your brand over a specific period of time. Customer retention is just as important as customer acquisition, and brands can improve this metric through things like customer loyalty programs or repeat purchase incentives. Being able to retain a strong customer base means consumers continue to prefer your brand over others.
- Customer loyalty: Similar to customer retention, customer loyalty measures the degree to which customers repeatedly purchase from and advocate for your brand. They are buyers of your brand that, when given an option between you and a competitor, will ultimately choose (i.e. prefer) your brand.
- Brand equity: A metric indicating the overall mental value of your brand - including brand associations, brand recognition, and brand loyalty. High brand equity is often a crucial step in creating and building brand preference.
- Brand value: Brand value is the financial worth of your brand, often determined through market research and financial analysis. Like brand equity, consumers may lean toward brands with higher value when faced with an option.
- Sales data: Sales data – either internally provided or from a third party source – provides concrete evidence of brand performance and the impact of marketing campaigns. This helps your brand understand if consumers are gravitating toward your brand over others or if there’s room for improvement to more closely compete in the market.
- Sentiment analysis: This type of analysis measures the emotional tone of online conversations about your brand, often providing valuable insights into brand perception and preference. For example, quantilope captures sentiment analysis through its qualitative video solution, inColor. Within this tool, respondents can speak to why they prefer one brand over another, with the added context of body language and facial expressions.
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Strategies to enhance brand preference
After measuring and analyzing brand preference metrics, you may decide you want to enhance your current performance. Below are a few strategies to consider:
Develop a strong brand identity
To build brand preference, focus on how you stand out among competitors. Your unique and compelling brand identity includes your brand name, brand logo, brand messaging, and overall brand visuals. When consumers see your brand’s visual cues, will they immediately recognize it and associate it with what your brand stands for? If not, consider using market research methods like an A/B test or MaxDiff to understand and fine-tune the unique elements of your brand.
Deliver exceptional customer experience
It’s a safe assumption that consumers will prefer brands that provide an amazing customer experience. Focus on creating positive touch points across the entire customer journey, from your website presence, to in-store assistance and post-purchase customer service.
Maintain consistent messaging
Generally, consumers will trust brands that are consistent and stay true to their word. Ensure that your brand’s messaging is consistent across all channels, reinforces your brand positioning and values, and aligns with your target market’s aspirations, needs, and beliefs (as captured through a brand market research study).
Leverage social media
Utilize social media to engage with your target audience, build brand awareness, and foster brand loyalty. Choose trusted and respected influencers to promote and engage with your products and encourage customer referrals (perhaps even offering an incentive). In today’s market, social media is one of the best ways to connect directly with consumers.
Invest in brand tracking
Brand tracking studies offer something ad-hoc studies can’t: benchmarks. Benchmarks provide brands with helpful context into whether or not a metric is a point-in-time ‘blip’ or a true reflection of consumer behavior. Brands who are serious about enhancing their brand metrics over time (especially brand preference) should invest in brand tracking market research. They can choose between a traditional agency or an automated platform depending on their time constraints and needs. Brands can use the valuable insights gained from their brand tracker to refine their brand strategy and optimize future marketing efforts.
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Leverage quantilope to measure brand preference
quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform allows brands to measure and track brand performance and preference over time. With drag-and-drop modules to easily build a custom study or a library of pre-built survey templates to choose from, brands can craft a valuable brand preference study that will leave them with actionable insights to make informed business decisions.
Within their survey, brands can choose from any of quantilope’s 15 automated, advanced methods to dive deeper into brand preferences (such as Choice-based Conjoint, MaxDiff, or an A/B Test). These methods are accessible to researchers of any background or skillset, even those without any statistical or research experience.
As soon as a survey goes live, researchers can monitor insights in quantilope’s platform in real-time, watching as newly-available respondent data automatically populates their project’s charts and dashboards. They can lean on quantilope’s integrated AI co-pilot, quinn, for compelling chart headlines and dashboard summaries that stakeholders can quickly act on.
Brands might also opt to use quantilope’s qualitative research solution, inColor. Whether used on its own or to supplement quantitative metrics, inColor’s built-in sentiment analysis can identify potential brand preference barriers that aren’t as easily identifiable through quantitative methods.
By using quantilope's platform, businesses can:
- Conduct complex market research studies to understand their target audience and their preferences (without dealing with any complex processes).
- Track brand health metrics over time in a tracking study, such as NPS and Mental Availability.
- Measure the impact of marketing campaigns on brand preference and market share.
- Identify clear, actionable opportunities for brand growth.
quantilope provides the tools necessary to understand and improve your brand's standing in the market. With quantilope, businesses can make data-driven decisions that drive brand preference, customer loyalty, and ultimately, business growth.
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