One brand perception? Or many? The heterogeneity of intra‐brand knowledge

Abstract

Purpose

What customers associate with a brand is the result of what they have felt, learnt, seen and heard about the brand. This knowledge impacts the attitudinal and behavioral brand response of customers (and vice versa). This paper aims to identify how customer segments of one brand characterized by different levels of behavioral and attitudinal response intensity differ in terms of content and structure of brand associations..

Design/methodology/approach

The paper reports findings of two single‐brand studies, each comparing brand associations of customer groups with different brand response intensity levels: one in a business‐to‐customer (B2C) setting where knowledge is determined via brand‐to‐association retrieval, one in a business‐to‐business (B2B) setting with benefit‐to‐brand retrieval.

Findings

The findings show that consumer segments with differing behavioral and attitudinal brand response intensity show unique brand knowledge patterns. Consumers with high response intensity elicit more (favorable) brand associations, and elicit the brand more frequently when stimulated with the brand name. In addition, identical brand associations are rated differently favorable depending on the intensity of brand response.

Practical implications

To learn about the strength of a brand, organizations may complement frequently used comparisons with competing brands by investigating what distinguishes brand knowledge of various customer segments that differ with respect to their relationship with the focal brand. This allows targeting various segments more specifically.

Originality/value

This paper adds to our understanding of brand strength by comparing multiple intra‐brand segments and by understanding how their brand knowledge differs depending on their attitudinal and behavioral brand response. Such a perspective may provide more useful insights to fostering brand response than studying inter‐brand differences.

Citation

Koll, O. and von Wallpach, S. (2009), "One brand perception? Or many? The heterogeneity of intra‐brand knowledge", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 338-345. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610420910981819