Customer Brand Insistence Revisited

I have been preaching about the five drivers of customer brand insistence since we first developed and tested this brand equity measurement system in the late 1990s. Since then, we have tested this system with hundreds of brands across almost as many product and service categories. It indicates that five things drive customers from being aware of a brand to insisting upon the brand and then ultimately being loyal to and even being advocates of the brand.

Again, these are the five drivers:

AWARENESS

The first driver is awareness. If you offer the best product in its category backed by the best service offered at the lowest price delivering the best value, and no one has heard of it, you will not achieve any sales. Awareness is the cornerstone of any marketing campaign. Awareness not only puts a brand in a purchase consideration set, it also increases customer preference, quality perceptions and purchase intent. Strong marketing campaigns with both reach and frequency increase awareness as does broader distribution. And PR and proactive publicity, including publicity stunts, can significantly increase brand awareness.

RELEVANT DIFFERENTIATION

The difference between a commodity and a brand is not a name or a logo - it is relevant differentiation, or put another way, a unique value proposition. Give customers a reason to choose your brand over other brands in its product category. The best differentiators are shared values, self-expressive benefits ("brand as a badge"), extraordinary product purchase or usage experiences, superior customer insight that leads to anticipating and addressing latent needs, easy one-stop shopping and offering a superior value based on the perceived benefits received for the amount of time and money required to receive those benefits. Once the relevant differentiation is created, then the marketer needs to make the relevant differentiation very clear at each and every point of customer contact. Focusing on just one differentiating benefit increases a customer's ability to recall that benefit so choose the brand's differentiating benefit wisely. Here is a post on how to position your brand in overcrowded markets. And here is a post on branding in highly competitive categories.

VALUE

I already touched on this. For most people, the two scarce resources are time and money. Give them more time and more money while solving their problems or meeting their needs and you have delivered a good or perhaps even excellent value.

ACCESSIBILITY

All things being equal, the more accessible brand will get the sale every time. Wider distribution not only increases brand awareness, it also increases brand accessibility. 24/7 brand access is better than more limited access. Accepting multiple payment methods and one-click shopping also increases accessibility. There is also a psychological aspect to accessibility. Do people believe your brand to be accessible, or for one reason or another, do they feel that your brand is less accessible to them?

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

Brand personality, brand voice, brand visual style, brand trustworthiness (which includes brand consistency and reliability), brand responsiveness, outstanding customer service and technical support (with includes front-line employee training and empowerment), loyalty programs and purchase and usage frequency can all lead to increased emotional connection. Well thought-out marketing campaigns with highly emotional elements can also add to this. Here are two posts on the related concept of brand tribalism - Tribal Branding, Brands & Tribalism.

I am going to add one other thing to this list. Powerful brand MEMORY TRIGGERS that are consistently used over time and across campaigns will increase the ability of customers to remember the brand and associate it with its most powerful benefits to them. These triggers may include distinctive colors, shapes, icons, sounds, scents and other mnemonic devices. And they might be incorporated into the product itself, its packaging, its merchandising, its signing, its marketing campaigns, its insignia merchandise or other communication vehicles. Often, key elements of a brand's identity system are its primary memory triggers. Here is a related post on brands and memory structures. 

So, to create a winning brand, focus on awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility, emotional connection and memory triggers. 

What Do People Need Most?

People with plenty of money often do not have a lot of time, while people with a lot of time frequently do not have a lot of money. And many people do not have enough of either. It is the lucky few who have plenty of time and money. 

Time and money are the scarce resources built into our BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system. They are built into two of the five drivers of customer brand insistence, value and accessibility. Value has a numerator and a denominator. The numerator is comprised of the bundle of benefits that the customer receives, while the denominator represents how much time and money it takes to receive those benefits. Accessibility also relates to time and money as both of these make anything more accessible. 

But there is a third dimension that I don't often talk about and that is health/energy. You might have ample time and money, but if you do not have good health or adequate energy, the time and money are a moot point. 

In many surveys, when asked what they value most, people will indicate good health. 

So, if one is able to reduce the money, time or energy required to purchase and use the brand, the brand becomes more valuable. Conversely, if that brand itself can give people more time, money or health, it is adding significant value. 

So, when thinking about how you can increase your brand's value, consider how it can increase people's time, money or health/energy or how it can be acquired or used with less time, money or health/energy.  

And, as an interesting note, research suggests that people who value time over money are much happier. 

Peeling Back the Onion

Sometimes, in brand research, one must continue to "peel back the onion" to better understand what the consumer is really saying. Recently, a client of mine (a heath care system) discovered that it was delivering well against convenience and accessibility. They discovered this through a quantitative brand equity measurement survey. Multiple data points pointed to this strength, including a variety of scaled response questions and some open-ended response questions. 

What they didn't discover, however, is what this actually means. For that, they will need to "peel back the onion" through further research. For instance, in their industry, accessibility could mean any of the following:

• Convenient locations
• Convenient hours
• Convenient parking, including uncrowded parking, valet parking or free parking
• 24/7 accessibility in a non-hospital setting
• A wide variety of payment options, including installment payments
• A wide variety of insurances accepted including Medicare and Medicaid
• Accepting patients who cannot pay
• Short wait times
• Immediate access to doctors
• Easy access to patient records
• 24/7 waiting or lobby areas
• Quality on-site food
• Easy admissions process
• Clear wayfinding
• Easy website navigation
• Handicap accessibility such as parking spaces, ramps and elevators
• Accommodations for deaf and blind people

If this client wants to tout (and even enhance) its accessibility, it needs to know how it is perceived to be accessible. A marketer is very lazy if he or she stops at the concept of accessibility without exploring what that actually means. How else can he or she talk about it properly on behalf of the brand and how else would he or she know to whom this might have the greatest appeal?

When conducting brand research dig deep enough to fully understand what the customer is telling you. This may require "peeling back the onion" in a number of steps.

Branding and Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the five drivers of customer brand insistence in our proprietary BrandInsistence (SM) brand equity measurement system. Accessibility is critical in converting preference or need into an actual purchase. Time and money are the scarce commodities in most peoples' lives, therefore accessibility is related to locations, hours of operation and price. If the brand you prefer is available somewhere near or convenient to you during the hours when you are available and at a reasonable price, you will very likely make the purchase.

A few decades ago, Hallmark discovered that its card shops' typical hours of operation (9 am to 6 pm) was limiting their revenue potential, especially compared to grocery stores and other mass merchandisers that had much more convenient hours.

Amazon.com (and the Internet in general) shook up the retail world for a number of reasons, not the least of which was 24/7 accessibility. 

In real estate, the mantra is "location, location, location."

I have been frustrated visiting a city on a Tuesday or Wednesday only to find that its public art museum is closed. Most (so I assume all) museums are closed on Mondays but open other days of the week.

It took me quite a while to realize that a fine dining restaurant in my town is only open on Thursday evenings. (It caters events the other nights of a week.) In the interim, I largely ignored that nearby restaurant because it was mostly closed. 

Recently, I happened upon a place whose hours are Friday through Tuesday from 10 am to 2 pm.

My point in all of this is that your brand must be accessible. Ideally, it is available 24/7 at a reasonable price. 

Here are two other blog posts that I have written on brand accessibility: 1 and 2.

Brand Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the five drivers of customer brand insistence in our proprietary BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system.  How does accessibility contribute to customer brand insistence? First, accessible brands insure that brand preference is converted into brand purchase. Why wouldn’t I purchase my preferred brand if it were completely accessible to me? If it were inaccessible, I might purchase a substitute product or brand or perhaps nothing at all. But I am getting ahead of myself. First let’s define accessibility. Accessible brands are brands that are easy to find, purchase and use.

What makes something accessible? Distribution. When a brand has broader distribution, it not only increases its accessibility, it also increases its awareness, one of the other five drivers of customer brand insistence. So increased distribution can increase customer brand insistence in two ways.

If a brand is ubiquitous, there is no excuse not to purchase it if it is your favorite brand. McDonalds, KFC and HSBC strive to be ubiquitous worldwide.  One of the key pillars of Coca-Cola’s success is distribution. It talks about pervasive penetration and being within an arm’s reach of desire.  And, at least in my town, Dunkin' Donuts seems to be opening locations every few blocks, competing with Starbucks for ubiquity.  Hallmark’s closing stores around the country certainly demonstrates that it is in trouble.

The Internet is changing the importance of physical distribution a bit because it enables people to research and purchase products 24/7 from the comfort of their homes. This works better in some categories than others. For example, physical distribution is still important for many articles of clothing because unless you can try the clothes on and see how they fit, look and feel on you, you don’t really know if you want them. Online retailers have innovated many approaches to overcome this limitation, but it is still a limitation.

But, what other than distribution can increase accessibility? If you think about the two most important scarce resources in people’s lives, they tend to be time and money. So anything that takes less time or costs less money increases accessibility. A somewhat counterintuitive corollary of this is that if you can make the experience more interesting, educational, entertaining, exciting, nurturing or otherwise positive, often people won’t mind spending more time. The same thing goes for money. If the higher price is a signal of social status or good taste or some other positive self-expressive quality, a person may not be as put off by the higher prices.

Time and money also relate to the value brand insistence driver. Value has a numerator and a denominator. In the numerator are all of a brand’s benefits – functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive together with the values it shares with its customers. In the denominator is how much time, money and perceived effort it takes to purchase and use the brand.

High prices can make brands inaccessible to many people. For instance, not everyone can purchase a Tesla automobile. And even fewer people are able to purchase a Maserati or a Bugatti.

I often use the example of choosing a college or university to illustrate the concept of brand accessibility. If a high school student has a strong preference for a specific college, but that college does not accept him, what is that brand’s accessibility to him? How about if the college puts him on the waiting list? Or, if the college defers his admission for a year? What if he is accepted to the college but, after financial aid, that college will cost him ten thousand dollars more a year than the other colleges to which he got accepted?  So price (or cost to the customer) affects brand value and can affect brand accessibility too.

Limited store hours, nearby road construction, overcrowded parking lots, exceedingly long lines or only accepting cash as a form of payment can also reduce accessibility.

Accessibility helps brands grow through increased sales to existing customers and acquisition of new customers. Research has shown that larger brands have many advantages, even beyond the economies of scale and network effects. They have greater awareness, market penetration, popularity, and perhaps surprisingly, customer loyalty.

Even brands that have exclusivity as part of their mystique must be accessible in some way to their target markets.  For these high-end products and brands, price may be the best accessibility limiter. Price will be an issue for most people but not for the target customers. However, there still needs to be some sort of easy distribution method. The Internet is one option. Rodeo Drive (CA), The Mall at Short Hills (NJ) and other upscale shopping districts and centers is another. But how about selling the products at polo matches, equestrian events, yacht races and other targeted events.

Hopefully, this has shown that accessibility is an important driver of customer brand insistence. The other two drivers I mentioned in this article are awareness and value. The two brand insistence drivers that I did not mention (until now) are relevant differentiation and emotional connection. But, I will talk more about those in other blog posts.