Brands Still Learning

Brands Still Learning

By: Steve on March 2, 2012

A new study commissioned by Creston Unlimited into the qualities that define consumers brand choices and, the areas where marketing opportunities still remain to be explored.

In order to gain an insight into how consumers are, or aren’t, connecting with brands, eight benefit factors were measured for their effect on purchasing decisions: pleasure, responsibility, status, saving, individuality, effectiveness, belonging and confidence:

“Poorer women get an enormous amount out of brands on every single dimension, but particularly on status and belonging. But you almost never see the C2DE demographic as a target audience on a creative brief. Mass market brands are missing quite a lot of big tricks.”

Single parents also registered highly across the pleasure, responsibility and status metrics as well as an additional sense of ‘belonging’. But due to the scarcity of single parent representation in advertising, Crowther highlights this as another missed opportunity for brands.

Brand communications for mobile phone service providers generally tend to highlight the same or similar consumer lifestyle experiences as each other. But some brands like O2 are effectively differentiating their offer from their competitors:

“O2 stands out as bringing a lot more pleasure into people’s lives. It also performs much better than its competitors on the sector’s other weakest attributes – status, individuality and belonging. In fact, it enriches more of its customers’ lives than other mobile operators on every measure except saving money, where it is beaten only by Virgin Mobile.”

The report illustrates that there are depths to consumers relationships with brands that remain unexplored by brand marketers. In summary, the overall message appears to be: there’s work to be done.

You can read the complete article here

Photo by non-partizan