Did you hear about our fake brand?
Asking about brand awareness in online surveys feels like it should be simple – surely people have either heard of a brand or they haven’t? But sometimes we see results that defy explanation; for example, seeing high claimed awareness for a brand that isn’t available in a given market or region.
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When we saw significant overclaim in a survey that Brand Potential ran in China, we wanted to know why and whether there was anything we could do to mitigate it in future surveys.
So we partnered with Potentia Insight and designed a survey to test the impact of asking about brand awareness in different ways - conducting over 9,500 interviews with consumers in eight countries (the UK, USA, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, India and China – minimum 1,000 interviews per country). The survey asked about awareness of global soft drinks brands and, crucially, we included a fake brand that allowed us to identify mis-claim / over-claim.
The results were stark; the way in which we ask about brand awareness has a significant impact on the proportions that say they are aware of a brand.
And there were big differences across countries – for one of our question types, claimed awareness of the fake brand reaches 67% (net) in China, vs. 21% (net) in the UK and USA.
We hypothesise that the differences we see are down to two main factors:
Individual psychology, which applies across countries. That when we directly prompt about a brand (i.e. ‘have you heard of X brand?’), there’s room for people to be unsure. For some, in the absence of a‘not sure’ option, a ‘maybe I’ve heard of this brand’ will become a ‘yes’
Social dynamics (saving face and authority bias), that differ depending on country. This aligns with the extent to which a country can be seen as more ‘individualistic’ vs. more ‘collectivist’
We believe our findings have implications for agencies that conduct brand awareness studies (and other international research), and for brands that operate globally and measure their awareness. They highlight the importance of knowing international markets, of understanding cultural differences, and show how we should be mindful of taking apparently straightforward survey data at face value.
We talked through all of this in a recent webinar, you can watch the recording here. If you'd like to talk about how to design and interpret research that explores your brand across cultures, please get in touch at jon.knight@brandpotential.com.