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.