Brand salience and its implication for marketers

Today let's talk about the term Brand Salience!

So what exactly is brand salience?

Brand salience is essentially defined as the tendency of a particular brand to be in consideration of or noticed in buying situations and usually what people think about brand is measured by considering the attributes which are associated with brands and these attributes can be in terms of popularity or value for money. Measuring brand salience involves the use of a representative range of cues that are descriptive and most importantly in a competitive context. Brand salience emphasises on association and not evaluation. Again, I'll make it very straight forward and simple to you by using an example we used in the class, that is,

I've created a simple survey on measuring the brand salience of Qantas with a range of cues against their competitor brands.

Here's the link to my survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7FGGJJD

Pls feel free to attempt the survey if you have the time. This survey will give you a clear understanding of what brand salience is all about. Note that you are allowed to choose more than 1 brand in the survey questionnaires. This indicates that Qantas may not be the only brand you consider given that situation or a particular experience.

The difference in brand salience as compared to brand awareness and top of mind awareness is that brand salience is the brands that come into a consumer's mind when he/she is in a purchase situation, while brand awareness is noticing and recognising the brand and brand awareness is measured with a range of brand attributes, not just the product category cues, while brand salience is only measured using a wide range of cues. Furthermore, Top of mind awareness is simply a brand that comes into a consumer's mind when he/she is asked to recall a brand within a category, and it is typically linked to past behaviour.

Implications for Marketers

In order for a brand to have a huge chunk of the "mental availability" of consumers, it is crucial for marketers to:

1. Reach as many consumers as possible
2. Maximise consumers' share of mind, which is the number of associations and attributes that can be linked to consumers
3. Consistency is the key - being consistency in terms of brand attributes, brand communication strategy,    brand logo as well as  advertising is one of the key to building successful brand equity. Cadbury Dairy Milk is an ideal example of brand consistency.

How are brands being stored in a consumer's memory?

Today I'm gonna talk about a topic which involves 2 Bs: how a Brand is being stored into a consumer's Brain, or in a laymen term, memory. Interesting isn't it? YES thats right! Finally something a topic that excites you in my blog? Aww come on I'm not that boring am I?

Anyway, before I begin the topic, I'm gonna use a good example of a brand to describe how everything works. Here's the example I'm gonna use:

Prada, one of women's favourite brand of leather goods and designer wears

So there are basically 3 processes for a brand to be stored into memory: Encoding, Maintenance, and Retrieval.

Encoding

Firstly, when we encode information of the brand into our memory, we tend to form links with information already in our memory or we reinforce existing knowledge. For example, in our memory, we know that  the brand Prada produces leather goods and designer wears. However, one day there is an advertisement on Prada which shows the brand introducing their new product line: hand phones. So this is reinforcing that existing memory or information that a consumer has in his/her memory and now the consumer would be aware that Prada sells hand phones too. When encoding such information into memory, we tend to filter out many information which we came across, and only to take in things which are of interest to us as consumers.

Maintenance

The second process is maintenance, the way we store information into our memory and this is usually done by rehearsal or by repeating the information over and over in our brain. For example, now that we know Prada sells hand phones, we tend to share this information with buyers of Prada and usually they would be our friends and family. So by sharing this information we are repeating this over and over again, thus this information will be kept in our memory.

Retrieval

The third process is retrieval which is cue based, so we tend to use particular set of associations and cues which can be anything like colours, our five senses etc and this linked information can be retrieved and used as a retrieval cue for further information. Going back to the Prada example, when we think about wallets, we will think about Prada as their wallets are both trendy and durable and such information are linked and retrieved automatically from our memory. This process is crucial for brand managers who want to achieve greater brand salience. However, retrieval can be affected by mood.

The thing about consumers is that we tend to only store information which are useful, important, or relevant to our brains. We usually narrow down information which are extraordinary, and which we frequently use.