The Impact Of Top Of Mind Brand Awareness Marketing Essay

Introduction

One of the foremost goals of marketing is to create, build and maintain brand awareness. Rossiter and Percey (1987) claim that brand awareness is necessary for the communication process to take place and precedes all other steps in the communication process. A consumer will not buy a brand unless he/she is made aware of its existence. A brand that is not considered in the first place cannot be chosen (Baker, et al. 1986). It has been long argued that brand awareness has significant effects on consumer decision making by influencing which brands enter the consideration set and which of them are chosen thereof (Macdonald and Sharp, 1996). (Keller and Davey, 2001) see brand awareness as the foundation of their equity model upon which all other brand objectives build on. If consumers want to buy a product and a brand name can come to their minds instantaneously it reflects that the product has higher brand awareness. Consumers’ purchase decision can be influenced if a product has higher brand awareness (Dodds, Monroe, & Grewal, 1991; Grewal, Monroe & Krishnan, 1998). Furthermore, being aware of brand is the first stage in developing brand associations and attitudes (Aaker, 1991). This explains why a product with higher brand awareness scores is more likely to influence purchase intent and eventually be selected for purchase.

Generally, brand awareness falls into two categories, recognition and recall. Brand recognition occurs in stimulus-based situations whereas recall occurs in memory-based situations. However, there are three commonly used measures of brand awareness; spontaneous (unaided), top of mind and conditional (aided) awareness. Spontaneous or unaided awareness is an unforced recall of a brand from the consumer’s memory while top of mind recall is the first brand remembered when given a product category cue. Conversely, conditional or aided awareness is the recognition of a brand in response to some form of stimuli. Another dimension, brand dominance has been also been added in this research to check whether any one brand totally dominates a consumer’s mind. A brand is said to have brand dominance when it is the only brand recalled in a given product category. The ultimate awareness level is brand name dominance, where in a recall task; most consumers can only provide the name of a single brand.

Top of mind awareness is one of the first brand awareness measures to receive attention (Romaniuk, Sharp, Paech & Driesener, 2004) and is emerging as one of the best predictors of consumer choice. Wilson (1981 cited in Woodside & Wilson 1985) confirmed the importance of top-of-mind awareness in a study which found that the higher the position of the brand in the consumer’s mind measured by unaided recall, the higher the purchase intention and the higher the relative purchase of the brand. Consumer in the contemporary market place do not spend much time making purchase decisions and are already overwhelmed with a multitude of advertisements and other attention seeking endeavors of marketers. Therefore, (Macdonald and Sharp, 2004) argue that in most cases consumers try to minimize the costs of decision making in terms of time spent, and cognitive effort, by employing simple rules of thumb, such as ‘buy the brand I’ve heard of’. This is particularly likely to occur in low involvement situations where a minimum level of brand awareness may be sufficient for choice (Hoyer & Brown, 1990; Mackay, 1990). In such situations, the consumer may lack the motivation or the ability to judge between brands (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) and this is where ‘top of mind’ awareness will play its part and will lead to that brand being purchased which is the first to come to mind.

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Brand awareness should be the primary focus of the marketing efforts of any organization because it has a number of very important functions. It is widely acknowledged that without brand awareness occurring, brand attitude and brand image cannot be formed (Macdonald and Sharp, 2004).

(Fiske and Taylor, 1995) have contended that brand associations could be recalled in customer’s mind as emotional impressions. Brand awareness influences consumer decisions making by affecting the strength of the brand associations in their mind (Keller, 1993, 1997). (Pitta and Katsanis, 1995) also pointed out that there are several dimensions of brand awareness with brand associations. They further indicated that brand associations of the product can be stored in consumer’s minds after brand awareness of the product are already in their memory. (Atligan et al., 2005; and Pappu et al., 2005) found brand awareness and brand associations to be correlated. Moreover, high levels of brand awareness positively affect the formation of the product’s brand image (association) (Ramos and Franco, 2005). (Esch et al., 2006) also found that brand awareness affects brand image (association). It has been noted that “consumers brand awareness is likely to be high when they have strong associations for the brand and when they perceived the quality of the brand to be high and vice a versa” (Liao, Widowati and Hu, 2007, p. 5).

Consumer purchase intention is considered as a subjective inclination toward a product and can be an important index to predict consumer behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). According to (Chi, Yeh and Yang, 2009) consumers will have a higher purchase intention towards a familiar, well known brand than an unfamiliar one and a familiar brand is one which has higher brand awareness. Therefore, “the higher the brand awareness, the higher will be the purchase intention” (Chi et al., 2009, p. 6).

This study examines the impact of ‘top of mind’ brand awareness on consumer purchase intention with respect to the product category ‘Colas’ (a black carbonated soft drink). This is a low-involvement category with the products being common and purchased repeatedly. In such a situation, consumers do not actively engage in information search to aid in choice and rely more on memory than on other aspects. According to (Macdonald and Sharp, 2000) consumers in most purchase situations are ‘passive recipients’ of product information and spend negligible time and ‘cognitive effort’ while choosing brands. This is particularly true for Colas since it is a common, repeat purchase product. (Romaniuk et al., 2004) argue that when there are many options present (e.g., brands in store refrigerators) then aided awareness is relevant, when they are not, spontaneous awareness should be used. However when talking about Colas, top of mind awareness is more appropriate because choice between competing brands is made quickly and does not require much thought. Top of mind awareness is particularly essential for Cola products because they belonging to the low-involvement category where consumers do not give much thought to their decision. A brand that is top of mind is more likely to be selected simply because it is the first brand that comes to mind.

Very little empirical work has been done on the effects of brand awareness on consumer choice and more research is needed on how brand awareness effects purchase intention. More importantly, there has been even lesser research on what impact do each of the brand awareness measures in specific have on purchase intention. Brand awareness is a much neglected construct and deserves considerably more attention due to its central importance in brand choice. From an empirical point of view, numerous researchers have shown that brand awareness measures are powerful predictors of consumer choice behavior (e.g., Axelrod 1968; Haley and Case 1979; Nedungadi and Hutchinson 1985). Furthermore, from a conceptual or theoretical point of view, brand awareness has been recognized as preceding and necessary to brand evaluation (Howard and Sheth 1969; Holden and Lutz 1992; Nedungadi 1990). However, these researchers have failed to establish the impact of top of mind awareness in particular on consumer purchase intention.

The important question then is why is top of mind awareness so important? Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “famous” as being “much talked about.” In business we call this top of mind awareness. From a marketing standpoint, the key to increased sales is creating and sustaining top-of-mind awareness with both existing and prospective customers. The ultimate goal of any company is to achieve high levels of sales and ultimately build high levels of brand loyalty and top of mind awareness does just that. Some studies suggest that the cost to attract a new customer is more than five times of maintaining a loyalty customer (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990; Barsky, 1994). That is, the higher the brand loyalty, the less cost businesses to pay. Top of mind awareness is the first step in the process towards brand loyalty which is what most companies seek to gain, and for that reason it is of such meaning to marketers.

According to (Variya, 2005) top of mind awareness does two things:

It psychologically impacts people so that the mere mention and knowledge of one’s company, product, or service inherently creates a need for them, and

It places a brand at the top of a specific market’s consciousness so that it is instantly chosen when people want what that person or firm has to offer.

Although prior studies have investigated the direct impact of brand awareness on consumers’ brand choice, the mediating role of brand associations lacks empirical evidence. Top of mind awareness has rarely been researched to find out what effect it has on the likelihood of purchase. From this standpoint, this research holds considerable importance and will add to the existing literature and give some empirical evidence.

This study is also very important with respect to Pakistan. With companies in the carbonated soft drinks (CSD) industry belligerently fighting for market share, top of mind awareness has become integral to their survival and eventual growth. Some new local brands like ‘Amrat Cola’ and ‘Gourmet Cola’ have popped up in recent years and are fighting intensively for a share of the market from the top contenders; Coke and Pepsi. This however will prove even more difficult for them if they do not build significant top of mind awareness. Top of mind awareness is especially vital to their success because they are not as salient in the minds of the consumers and hence are not even considered during purchase.

Research Question

The research question in study is: To what extent does Top of Mind Awareness impact a consumer’s purchase intention?