Measuring and Interpreting Brand Performance - Case Study Example

Measuring & Interpreting Brand Performance Name Institution Instructor Course Date Executive Summary This paper touches on brand performance in target market of five brands of cereals; weet-bix, corn flakes, special k, cheerios, and just right brand. It also focuses on brand awareness and brand salience and their importance. Finally, it discusses several target groups that were profiled relative to their consumption of five brands of cereals. Brand performance assesses the success rate of every cereal brand relative to each other in the same market. Performance of a brand is considered as a factor which corresponds to the evaluation of success of a brand in the market and it helps brands to attain their market goals. The paper also pays attention to the duplication of the purchase law in a market relative to five cereal brands. Duplication of purchase law refers to the concept that brands share buyers with other brands in regard to their relative shares and partitioning is commonly fairly rare and frequently small. Brand salience is also discussed with special interest on weet-bix relative to other products. Brand salience is defined as the propensity of a brand to be noticed or thought in a purchasing situation. This concept is reflected in terms of the quality and quantity of the network relating to the brand information within memory. The more cues a brand is associated to, the more it is likely to be linked to the cues that the buyer is likely to encounter during a buying situation. Several target groups of cereals were also compared where women versus men were compared. Also a comparison among singles couples and separated or divorced groups were compared too. Incomes versus cereal consumption trends were also observed and how all these factors affect the marketing strategy of weet-bix. Brand Performance Brand performance focuses on how successful particular brand in the market is as and aims to assess the strategic success of particular brand. Brand play a primary role to the success of an organization by way of creating competitive advantage through the performance of non product associated means. Performance of a brand is considered as a factor which corresponds to the evaluation of success of a brand in the market and it helps brands to attain their market goals. Weet-Bix is at the second position in brand performance after corn-flakes in the same market. Corn flakes as a brand enjoys a nine percent market share margin above its main competitor Weet-Bix. The second main competitor of Weet-Bix is Special K brand that is exceeded by Weet-Bix in terms of market share by a five percent margin. Cheerios brand is the third major competitor of Weet-Bix while the least competitive in terms of market share is the Just Right brand with only 6.1 percent of market share. Corn flakes have the highest market penetration with twenty percent difference from Weet-Bix with fifty two percent penetrations. Special K, Cheerios, and Just Right enjoy third, fourth, and fifth position of market penetration compared to Weet-Bix which is second in the same e market. This means that the market share and market penetration success rates for all the brands show similar trend where corn flakes tops followed by Weet-Bix, Special K, Cheerios, and Just Right respectively. The average purchase frequency for corn flakes and Weet-Bix is equal while that of Special K, Cheerios, and Just Right is high to low respectively. The trend is reversed for category buying rate where just right tops and corn flake is the least. Cheerios, special k, and Weet-Bix as brands fall between from highest to the least respectively. Weet-Bix is second in terms of percentage share of category requirement while Corn Flakes lead the category but Special K, Cheerios and Just Right come third, fourth and fifth respectively. The trend is retained for percentage sole loyalty except that cheerios and just right have nil percentage representation (Hankinson, 2012 p.974-981). The major competitor of Weet-Bix is thus Corn Flakes and Special K brands. Other major competitors are Special K, Cheerios and Just Right brands in a progressive decline respectively. This is well exemplified in a duplication of purchase table where corn flake brand show strong competitive power in that much as other products are bought , corn flakes has the highest duplicate purchase power of seventy one percent on average. Weet-Bix lags behind by a three percent difference from corn flakes. This makes both Weet-Bix and corn flakes the most competitive brands in cereal market. Special k follows closely with an average of sixty one percent which is a nine percent difference from Weet-Bix. Cheerios and just right are the least competitive in the market with average duplication of purchase of forty six and thirty two percent respectively. Duplication of purchase law refers to the concept that brands share buyers with other brands in regard to their relative shares and partitioning is commonly fairly rare and frequently small. Brands that occur closely together within the perceptual map do not share customers more often than the brands that are further partitioned apart but instead image positions are mostly independent to the brand purchasing patterns. Deviations from this rule are clear in this case because some brands (Corn Flakes and Weet-Bix) consistently appear to have higher response levels. There could have been small, higher priced brands consistent with the perception that a little differentiated brands are likely to be smaller. In addition, such deviations can be associated to functional differences (taste, texture) instead of image differentiation. Market managers need to make effort to distinguish their brands in the market from others to encounter less direct competition. This principle is based on brands offer distinguishable features that impress different market segments and the transaction costs as well as information imperfections (Rubinson and Pfeiffer, 2005 p.187-197). Awareness and Salience Brand salience refers to the propensity of a brand to be noticed or thought in a purchasing situation. This concept is reflected in terms of the quality and quantity of the network relating to the brand information within memory. The more cues a brand is associated to, the more it is likely to be linked to the cues that the buyer is likely to encounter during a buying situation. Marketing managers concerned should be at brand attitude too. Brand attitude involves entails evaluation of a brand other than the quality and quantity of the memory structures. This involves top of mind awareness where a brand is first recalled upon a prompt by the product category cue. It is important to measure brand salience and it involves three critical factors. It should have a range of cues or attributes so that it can be used to think of brands during buying or consumption situations. It is also important for purposes of a portioning benefits and functionality qualities. Brand salience also measures the recall relative against competitors other than for individual brand independently (Tiwari & Roy, 2012, p. 45). This is because retrieval is an activity that is competitive and replicates an actual customer experience very closely. In addition, measuring brand salience focuses on retrieval other than brand evaluation. This is to mean that a brand is either retrieved or not once prompted by a cue, such as taste, other than the extent around a rating scale that applies on a brand. This is therefore important factor during marketing because retrieval from the memory is cue based and cues originates from the context. Marketers therefore need to comprehend the cues that a buyer uses often. Empirically, all options are barely notices during purchase but rather involves selective attend to a few. This means that during buying situation, if a brand is not thought of it cannot be bought. If a brand is thought of for one cue, it is not automatic that it will be for other cues. It is important to view competition from customer’s perspective eyes and thus competition may vary over time by situation. It is therefore important to build brand salience of a product to promote its competitive advantage in the market (Visentin, 2013 p.43-57). Brand salience concept in the table is consistent in that corn flake bears the highest brand salience on all levels (top of mind awareness, overall brand awareness, salience whole sample and user only) and is thus the most competitive brand in a market shared with other cereals such as Weet-Bix, Special K, Cheerios, and Just Right brands. Weet-Bix, just like all other brands, show consistency in terms of brand salience concept adherence whereby competitiveness of a brand depends on the measure of parameters of brand salience; the high the brand salience measure the more the brand is competitive in the market. Weet-Bix does not perform as expected in terms of salience ‘whole sample’ whereby there is a significant margin between its leading competitor corn flake and the margin is very narrow to its closest competitor yet Weet-Bix is second most competitive in the market. The implication of salience result in terms of marketing strategies is critical. Marketing of Weet-Bix should focus on improving top mind awareness and salience as a whole sample. This because both parameters are the ones responsible for overall low Weet-Bix salience and consequently reduced competitiveness in the market. Some of the cues that are required for Weet-Bix advertisement includes, taste, texture, color, aroma, flavor, health, digestibility, nutrition, quality, and quantity (Zineldin, 2004 p.780–789). Demographics and Segmentations According to the demographics table, Weet-Bix show significant match in the customer profiles relative to its competitors. There is consistence of consumptions by all groups profiled. Couples lead in terms of consumption. However, within this group cheerios and Weet-Bix are most preferred and are equally preferred. Special k and just right brands are second preferred at an equal measure (Wong & Merrilees, 2005, p.157). Corn flakes are the least preferred within category. In the single people cluster just right brand is the most preferred among all other brands. Corn flakes are the second best preferred cereal followed by cheerios. Weet-Bix is preferred more than special k although with a slight margin. In other words, Weet-Bix is second least preferred within single class category. Divorced or separated groups second major preference is corn flakes and Weet-Bix by an equal measure. Within this group, special k is the most preferred of all brands compared. The cheerios brand is the least consumed after just right brand. There is no single brand that is most favorite across the three profiled groups. In terms of deviation from the observed trend of brand preference in the market, just right brand show the greatest deviation rate within the single group while special k is second most deviated followed by Weet-Bix and corn flakes. Deviation within the couple class is most observed in corn flakes, cheerios, and Weet-Bix respectively. Deviation rate of just right and special k is equal in the couple group. Special k deviates most in the divorced or separated group but at equal measure to cheerios although to the negative side. The brand ‘Just right’ is second most deviated in the same group followed by Weet-Bix and then corn flakes respectively. Weet-Bix is therefore well within the trend of customer profile relative to other brands competing (Sweldens, 2010 p.476). In terms of gender females consume cereals more than males almost by fifty percent more. The preference of many within female group is the Weet-Bix although with very slight margin to other brands. In the male category, the most consumed brand is corn flakes and the least preferred is Weet-Bix although by a slight margin of less than seven among other brands. Averagely in terms of income, the more the earning the more the consumption of cereals. This is the trend with every other brand except Weet-Bix where those earning between fifty thousand and seventy thousand consume less than other groups otherwise other groups obey the trend for Weet-Bix consumption. In terms of marketing strategy females and couples consume more and thus these are the groups that require to be targeted more during advertisement of Weet-Bix in a target market. The group earning fifty thousand to seventy thousand should also be sensitized more because they consume other cereal brands except Weet-Bix but it is a potential group to target. References Hankinson, G 2012, 'the measurement of brand orientation, its performance impact, and the role of leadership in the context of destination branding: An exploratory study', Journal Of Marketing Management, 28, 7/8, pp. 974-999. Rubinson, J, & Pfeiffer, M 2005, 'Brand Key Performance Indicators as a Force for Brand Equity Management', Journal Of Advertising Research, 45, 2, pp. 187-197. Zineldin, M 2004, ‘Co-optition: The organization of the future. Marketing Intelligence and Planning’, Vo. 22, no.27, pp.780–789. Visentin, M, Colucci, M, & Luca Marzocchi, G 2013, 'Brand measurement scales and underlying cognitive dimensions', International Journal Of Market Research, vol.55, no.1, pp. 43-57. Sweldens, S, J. Van Osselaer, S, & Janiszewski, C 2010, 'Evaluative Conditioning Procedures and the Resilience of Conditioned Brand Attitudes', Journal Of Consumer Research, 37, 3, pp. 473-489. Tiwari, A, & Roy, D 2012, 'Measuring Brand Strength: Concept And Mobile Handset Study', International Journal Of Mobile Marketing, 7, 3, pp. 38-55. Wong, H.Y., & Merrilees, B 2005, ‘A brand orientation typology for SMEs: A case research approach’, Journal of Product and Brand Management, vol.14, no.3, pp.155–162. Read More