Are Consumers Aware to Care?
An Investigation into Consumer Awareness of Brand Purpose
Brand purpose has gained much attention in the marketing industry over the last decade and has been championed by some of the biggest consumer goods companies worldwide. For this thesis, brand purpose is defined as “...a brand’s prolonged and publicised commitment to an environmental/social objective which has the aim of providing an altruistic benefit to those that buy the brand”. There are many positive outcomes touted for what a brand purpose marketing strategy can achieve; including an increase in sales, higher levels of loyalty, the ability to differentiate the brand, and sustain a price premium. However, most of these claims are not based on empirical evidence. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by emphasising what is arguably the most crucial gatekeeper step: consumers' awareness of the brand's purpose. This is essential because for the brand purpose to affect consumers' behaviour and attitudes, they must first be aware of it.
A Replication and Extension of ‘Measuring advertising’s effect on mental availability’
The focus of this thesis is on the measurement of mental availability in response to brand advertising, through a differentiated replication and extension of the work of Vaughan et al. (2021) and Vaughan (2016). This research addressed two methodological limitations of the prior work that used Mental Availability (MA) Metrics. The study demonstrates that MA Metrics are a suitable tool for measuring change in mental availability for brands following advertising, and explores a new measure of Number of Associations (NOA). It builds on the knowledge around the instability of brand attribute measures at the individual level and the role of advertising in building and refreshing relevant memories.
Sisters, not Twins. An Investigation of Visual Brand Identity Cohesion across a Product Portfolio
In today’s cluttered marketing environment visual brand identity is a crucial means to differentiate a brand from its competitors. Comprising clear, proprietary cues, the purpose of brand identity is to unify disparate brand elements in a manner that feels seamless to consumers. Representing both an opportunity and a threat to building a brand’s identity are line extensions, that is, when a product is launched under an existing brand name into the same category.
To communicate a strong visual brand identity, all products within a portfolio need to be connected to one another in terms of design. It is this unified visual message that enables consumers to perceive the products as members of a single brand family. A crucial means to achieve this cohesion is the visual similarity of Distinctive Brand Assets such as logos, colours, shapes, typefaces, characters, and styles. When effectively built and linked to the brand, these brand assets act as powerful mnemonic devices to improve brand learning, retention and accessibility from memory. Akin to a mental short cut, well established Distinctive Assets form heuristic devices that help shoppers to find their brands on-shelf.
This thesis presents three studies which investigate the coherence of visual brand identity, as well as key drivers of fragmentation, across products in a branded portfolio. In total, the scope of this research spans over 2100 products from 211 brands in 11 categories and three markets.
NOTE: The appendices for this Thesis are too large to post on the website. Please contact the Institute to obtain a full copy.
Do brands that grow advertise differently to those that do not?
Market share stationarity is the norm in established categories and developed markets with growth (or decline) clearly the exception. Nonetheless, growth targets remain common practice in business and marketing plans.
Advertising is a key scalable tool and one of the large budget items marketers have to help achieve growth. Yet there is limited generalisable evidence and knowledge to inform how much to spend on advertising and how to allocate budgets across media and time. The purpose of this study is to understand whether growing brands advertise differently to non-growing brands, with a focus specifically on advertising budgeting and media planning.
NOTE: The appendices for this Thesis are too large to post on the website. Please contact the Institute to obtain a full copy.
How do disruptions to physical and mental availability of brands affect consumer behaviour?
Various research studies show that brands with high physical and mental availability have high market shares (Sharp, 2010a, Ehrenberg et al., 1997, Farris et al., 1989). Changes in these two factors are very likely to affect consumer brand choices and the subsequent market shares of those brands. Understanding how and under what conditions changes in mental and physical availability affect consumer brand buying is crucial, and therefore, the focus of this thesis.
Building upon the study by Bronnenberg et al. (2012), this thesis examines international migrants’ purchase behaviour (i.e. how their brand buying changes once they move countries) in comparison to locals’ purchasing behaviour. As migrants settle into their new homes, they can no longer shop at their previous grocery stores. Therefore, migrants have greater access to various new brands, and less access to foreign brands they were once accustomed to purchasing. Thus, the expectation is that migrants to any new market will start to buy these brands and look like local shoppers (see Stocchi et al., 2017). However, due to migrants’ prior long-term exposure to the brands they historically purchased (i.e. foreign brands), migrants may purchase the brands that are still mentally available to them and devote less of their purchases to the unfamiliar brands (i.e. domestic brands) in their new location – at least at first. It is not known for how long or how strongly these effects last. This natural experiment allows us to further understand how changes to physical and mental availability influence consumer brand buying patterns.
Let’s get physical! Expanding marketing science to physical activity behaviour
Public health researchers and practitioners try to understand how people allocate finite time across various activities (including physical activity). Similarly, marketers seek to understand how people spend their limited money across different products. Marketing science has identified generalizable patterns of buying behaviours (empirical generalisations/laws) that inform brand growth strategies. As physical activity is a repeat- behaviour, like buying goods and services, this thesis aims to suggest ways to promote physical activity through the application of marketing science knowledge to physical activity data.
How does childhood brand exposure influence buying behaviour and brand recognition in adulthood?
People tend to repeat past behaviour, forming habits. Some habits become ingrained over time as the associations between the sequence of behaviours are consistently reinforced. Given the high frequency of brand consumption and purchase in our daily lives, consumer behaviour is repetitive. It has been suggested that older consumers, having more purchase and consumption experience, have more established habits due to the higher cumulative frequency of repetitive behaviours (as compared to younger people.
A consequence of repeated behaviours over time can be observed where older consumers are more likely to buy familiar brands. These familiar brands, or established brands, have been in the market for a long time, which allows for higher cumulative frequency of brand exposure or usage compared to newer brands. However, this topic of the initiation and development of consumer brand preferences is under-explored. There is a need to understand how brand preferences develop and endure over time. Such knowledge is vital to determine the influence of temporal (brand age) on consumer behaviour.
This research aims to better understand two aspects of long-term brand exposure: consumer behaviour and consumer memory of brands.
How do mental availability metrics respond to advertising?
For a brand’s advertising to be effective it is commonly agreed that it must affect consumer memory. Far more contentious is how to measure this effect. This thesis focuses on the memory construct of mental availability, which is defined as the propensity of a brand to be noticed or come to mind for individuals in buying or consumption situations. Literature explains that memory largely determines selection when faced with a brand choice. The relevance of a brand’s mental availability for marketers is therefore to ensure the brand has presence in the minds of consumers, and is linked to relevant cues encountered in buying and consumption situations.
Are luxury/premium products different? Do they share attributes and purchase patterns with non-luxury/non-premium products?
Luxury brands belong to one of the fastest-growing product categories with the highest profits. Most of the recent research of luxury/premium products has been conducted without describing or agreeing on the definition of the actual terms. Marketing and brand managers need to understand what attributes consumers associate with luxury/ premium products. The first objective is to understand what attributes consumers associate with luxury and premium products, and the price points to which consumers perceive these attributes to belong. The second objective is to establish whether actual consumers’ purchase patterns of luxury/premium products are similar to the well-known purchase patterns for non-luxury/non-premium products in the marketplace.
How destination image and country visitation affects consumer perceptions and preference for a country’s products
This thesis evaluates substantive theory on country-of-origin effects, develops understanding of the role of tourism in promoting the consumption of Australian made products, and demonstrates new outcomes that can be achieved by applying alternative methods to capturing these effects. The outcomes should be of interest to a broad readership including those interested in, tourism and country of origin research, as well as those interested in a comparison of methods for measuring country image effects in the interest of further advancing the field. Finally, this work should also appeal to practitioners, tour operators and exporters of both agricultural and packaged goods interested in capitalising on the opportunities provided by rapidly expanding Chinese consumer markets.
