Do consumers reject brands? Which, where and how often.

Abstract

Consumers may sometimes make a conscious decision to reject buying a particular brand. These negative attitudes undermine the effect of a brand’s mental and physical availability. They may require special tactics to change attitudes. Or managers simply need to accept these ‘rejectors’ as an upper limit on the brand’s growth potential.

So how much brand rejection actually happens?

We analysed multiple measurements of rejection across 535 brands in 24 categories across 23 countries. Our main finding is that most brands have few rejectors. The median rejection level is 9%, and most (85%) brands have rejection levels of less than 20%. Indeed only 9% of small share brands had a rejection problem greater than their lack of awareness. Therefore brand rejection need not concern most marketers.

Brands with higher rejection levels tend to be functionally different, and in most cases were smaller share brands. This suggests that the higher than usual rejection levels are largely created by brand differentiation.

BACKGROUND

What is brand rejection? Brand rejection is an attitudinal barrier to purchase, where consumers are opposed to buying the brand. This doesn’t mean they won’t buy, but rather they don’t want to.

A high incidence of brand rejection suggests the possible need for changing attitudes, or lower growth expectations. Therefore it is useful to understand under what conditions brands face high levels of rejection.

Reasons or Rejection

A number of studies have uncovered the reasons for brand rejection (see Table 1). Rejection based on past negative experience with a brand is most common, accounting for almost a half of overall rejection. The next most common are low perceived quality and the perception that a brand is too expensive.

Table 1: Reasons for rejection

Reason	Quotes	Overall incidence
Negative past experience	Tried it and it’s tasteless	46%
Low perceived quality inferred from extrinsic cues	It looks cheap; Cheap and nasty, I’ll buy decent chocolate	17%
Too expensive		16%
Spillover/Halo effect	All generics are rubbish	9%
Lack of trust	Not sure who makes it; unsure of taste	3%

A spillover or halo effect, where people reject a class of brands (such as Private Labels) rather than specific brands, follow these reasons. Lack of trust and moral objections (e.g., use of palm oil) also occur, but these make up a small part of the total reasons for rejection.

Clearly rejection can happen, however the strategic question is how much, and for what sort of brands.

METHOD AND DATA

We analysed 50+ data sets from commercial studies conducted in the last 5 years. To explore generalisability our data sets spanned 24 product categories and 23 countries.

The countries varied from developed markets such as the UK, the US, Germany and Australia through to emerging markets such as India, China and Taiwan. We also looked at a wide variety of categories such as cars, computers and chocolate, toothpaste, haircare and whisky.

We had multiple measures of the same brand, as our data covered the same categories in different countries or in different years. This gave us 826 brand rejection observations across 534 brands.

The surveys took place over the last five years, via telephone, face-to-face and online surveys. We excluded private labels as they will be the subject of a separate corporate report.

A key criteria for selecting data is that we could screen for awareness, so those who are not aware of the brand are not considered rejectors. Table 2 lists the different questions used identify brand rejectors. The measures all produced very similar results.

Example of Results

Here we present some results from the UK banking market, collected in July 2012 (n=1500). We chose to illustrate the results with this category because of the negative sentiment about the category. The combined media attention and recent poor financial performance of particular brands means we might expect to see high rejection levels. But yet on average, twice as many consumers have no opinion about any brand as actively reject it.

We do see some exceptions. Barclays and Northern Rock in particular have relatively high rejection levels. For Barclays this is explained by the survey occurring during the Libor scandal and Northern Rock gained fame during the sub-prime mortgage crisis. However given these were major negative events, it is surprising rejection levels are not higher.

Table 3: Example of results from UK Banking category

Brand	% Current Customers	% Aware	% Aware That Reject	% No Opinion
Halifax	25	94	12	25
Lloyds	24	94	14	25
Santander	24	93	19	26
Barclays	22	96	24	22
Natwest	21	83	15	26
HSBC	15	95	12	29
RBS	8	91	22	32
FirstDirect	3	93	10	44
North. Rock	3	91	33	38
C&G	2	69	8	47
Clydesdale	1	57	10	54
Standard. Chart	1	35	10	58
Average	12	83	16	36

RESULTS

Key finding 1: The median brand rejection level is 9%

We find that for most brands rejection is low. For 85% of brands, fewer than 20% of buyers in the category state a negative attitude to buying the brand (see Figure 1). This means that the vast majority of customers are happy to continue buying the brand or are available for the brand to acquire.

We looked more closely at the brands that had over 1/3rd of the market rejecting them (n=37). A consistent factor was the presence of a functional difference that is likely to turn off some people. Examples include Diet soft drinks; being targeted solely at children (such as L’Oreal Kids 2 in 1 shampoo or Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal) and functional variants such as Antidandruff shampoo or Decaffeinated Tea.

Therefore if your brand is functionally different, you might expect higher rejection.

Figure 1: Distribution of brand rejection levels

The median brand rejection level is 9%

Key finding 2: Larger share brands typically have lower rejection levels (4%) than smaller share brands (10%)

Brand size can influence marketing metrics, and so we compared the rejection level of larger share brands with that of smaller share brands.

For each data set we identified the two largest and two smallest brands (n=155 for each), and compared the median rejection levels. Note: Middle share brands are excluded from this analysis. This approach allowed us to compare the results across different categories.

We find that smaller share brands have about double the rejection rate of larger share brands. However this apparently negative fact needs to be tempered by two considerations.

Table 4: Brand rejection levels by category

Category Type	Overall Rejection %	Bigger Brands Rejection %	Smaller Brands Rejection %
Food Products	19	9	23
Impulse	15	11	26
Durables	11	8	14
Retail	8	6	8
Personal Care	7	3	11
Household	6	4	5
Alcohol	5	4	3
Ave (24 cat)	9	4	10

First, small brands still have an average rejection level of only 10%, which leaves many non-customers who do not reject them. Second, we found that smaller brands are more likely to be functionally different.

Smaller brands face many challenges. There exists a large proportion of the market that doesn’t know a lot about them.

The significance of the higher rejection we observe is dwarfed by this larger challenge of gaining attention when most customers are unfamiliar with the brand.

Larger share brands typically have lower rejection levels (4%) than smaller share brands (10%)

Key finding 3: Rejection was low across all countries

We know that emerging markets are a high priority for many of our Ehrenberg-Bass Sponsors. Our results show that rejection rates are low for all countries (see Table 5 where we list the countries with studies from multiple categories).

We then compared rejection rates for brands in the same category across for emerging and developed markets (see Table 6). There was some overall evidence of an even lower rejection rate for emerging markets, although this trend was not universal (as can be seen from the results for Personal Care Category 1).

Therefore we don’t see the differences here as overly meaningful. The key learning is that brand rejection is not of major concern in any country, emerging markets are no different in that regard.

Table 5: Rejection rates by country

Emerging Markets		Developed Markets
Country	Rejection %	Country	Rejection %
Philippines	14	UK	16
Poland	12	Australia	10
India	11	Germany	10
Malaysia	9	France	8
China	8	US	8
Turkey	7	Italy	6
Thailand	4	Spain	6
Brazil	3
Mexico	3
Russia	3

Table 6: Direct comparison of categories in emerging and developed markets

	Emerging Markets	Developed Markets
Personal Care category 1	20	16
Personal Care category 2	5	7
Personal Care category 3	4	9
Alcoholic Beverages	3	6

Rejection was low across all countries

Key finding 4: Lack of awareness is typically more of a problem than rejection

For brands who want to grow it is necessary to recruit new customers.

There are three potential barriers to trial:

(a) Awareness – I don’t know the brand

(b) Distribution – I know the brand, but it is not available for me to buy

We used the non-awareness and rejection levels to calculate the proportion of brands that have (a) an awareness problem, where non-awareness is much higher than rejection; or (b) a rejection problem, where rejection is much higher than non-awareness.

We find that for larger share brands, 32% had a greater awareness problem, 25% had a greater r ejection problem and the remainder had both around the same level. However 83% of smaller share brands had a greater awareness problem and only 9% had a greater rejection problem. Therefore most of the time, there is more of an issue with consumers being unaware of the brand than rejecting the brand.

Unfortunately we don’t have the figures to determine (b) but we suspect in emerging markets, in particular, this is a major issue. Future reports will deal with this topic of physical unavailability.

Lack of awareness is typically more of a problem
than rejection

SUMMARY & IMPLICATIONS

The low brand rejection levels we have observed here indicate that for the majority of brands, rejection should be of minor concern. Brand rejection is not stifling brand growth, whereas lack of mental availability and (presumably) physical availability are of far greater concern. The exceptions are a few (typically small) brands with major functional differences.

To address concerns that the direct questions are masking rejection levels, we looked at people’s capacity to respond to questions on brand rejection. In a subset of data we calculated the percentage of people who rejected at least one brand. This figure averaged 45%.

Therefore many of us have a brand we don’t wish to buy. However, consumers simply do not reject many brands often. Low sales are not due to being disliked. It’s due to being unknown. Then once you are known, it is a challenge to remain salient to consumers (see Corporate report #16 for more on this).

The strategic implications of high brand rejection

High levels of rejection imply that building mental and physical availability is not enough. Even if consumers easily think of, and find a brand, the rejection mechanism will stop any buying taking place.

However, the reality is that the effects of attitudinal rejection are not known. Clearly rejection is not good, and it must depress the likelihood of purchase, but how much? We all do things that we do not like, for reasons of convenience, due to lack of alternatives on the day, to fit in with friends or please someone else.

Sometimes we forget that we don’t like something, sometimes we deliberately (or accidentally) give it another try, and sometimes we change our minds.

So while any rejection is bad, it does not absolutely preclude purchase. But how much does it restrict a brand’s growth?

It is not known whether investments in growing mental and physical availability would yield greater growth than efforts to reduce rejection. We argue that it would depend on the brand’s situation. A brand with high mental and physical availability but also high rejection is likely to benefit most from a strategy to reduce rejection.

Our data shows this is a rare situation. A very normal situation is to suffer from little brand rejection but considerable gaps in mental and physical availability so it is these latter areas where efforts should be directed.

Tracking rejection over time

Examining results over time we find rejection levels do not vary substantively. Therefore we would recommend benchmarking rejection in your category to determine if your brand is an exception. Then over time only assessing this for new entrants or major reformulations.

This can be accompanied with questions to capture the reasons for rejection, which may identify issues with a new entrant that are able to be quickly remedied, e.g. hard to use packaging.

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