Brand Choice: Revealing Customers' Unconscious-Automatic and Strategic Thinking Process

Research on consumer automatic-unconscious and strategic-cognitive processes in associating brands with evaluative attributes (i.e., best quality; best value; slowest service) offer valuable tools for marketers wanting to understand the primary associations (i.e., the drivers) a brand owns in the minds of customers. A few such drivers connect to the brand that the consumer identifies as her primary choice. With the research methods described in this book, advertising and marketing strategists also learn which, if any, consumers retrieve their brand automatically-unconsciously in connection for important evaluative attributes. Marketing strategists may make the mistake of advertising an attribute and benefit consequence that their brand cannot possibly possess. This failure-to-connect may be the case because a competing brand dominates the market with respect to this particular attribute or benefit. Strategists may also err in advertising a quality or benefit that has little or nothing to do with their brand’s ability to attract and maintain primary customers. Given that consumers can easily summon up a brand as first coming to mind for a specific attribute, a handful of such automatic associates are demonstrably valuable in predicting brand choice behaviour