چگونگی ارتباط آگاهی از برند با نتایج بازار، ارزش ویژه برند و ترکیب بازاریابی

Combining survey data with real-market data, this research investigates brand awareness from three perspectives. This study examines the relation between brand awareness and market outcome and explores the relation between brand awareness and brand equity. The study also investigates the effects of marketing mix elements on brand awareness. Results reveal consumers' brand usage experiences contribute to brand awareness, implying experience precedes awareness in some contexts. The results also confirm positive association between brand awareness and brand equity. Lastly, the current work demonstrates the importance of distribution and price promotion in building brand awareness in a consumer-packaged goods category.

Brand awareness refers to whether consumers can recall or recognize a brand, or simply whether or not consumers know about a brand (Keller, 2008). Brand awareness precedes building brand equity. The brand name provides the memory nodes in consumers' minds (Aaker, 1991). Consumers may link the related brand knowledge to the brand name, which finally constitutes brand equity (Aaker, 1991 and Keller, 1993). Hence, brand awareness provides a kind of learning advantage for the brand (Keller, 2008). Brand awareness affects consumer decision-making, especially for low-involvement packaged goods. Brands that consumers know are more likely to be included in the consumers' consideration set (Hoyer and Brown, 1990 and MacDonald and Sharp, 2000). Consumers may use brand awareness as a purchase decision heuristic (Hoyer and Brown, 1990 and MacDonald and Sharp, 2000). Therefore, brand awareness increases brand market performance. Surprisingly, research on brand awareness is scarce. For instance, prior research explores brand awareness's affect on decision-making only through lab experiments at the individual consumer level (MacDonald and Sharp, 2000). Research linking brand awareness to actual market outcome primarily appears in service industry research (Kim and Kim, 2005 and Kim et al., 2003) with the exception of one study in consumer-packaged goods (Srinivasan et al., 2008). Furthermore, causality's direction between brand awareness and brand market outcome remains unexplored. Finally, the literature only partially investigates the question of how to build and enhance brand awareness. Past research typically focuses on the impact of either advertising or distribution intensity on brand awareness; yet only two studies consider the impact of price promotion on brand awareness but with inconsistent results (Srinivasan et al., 2008 and Yoo et al., 2000). The current study contributes to research on brand awareness in three ways. First, this study provides a comprehensive study of the relationship between brand awareness and market outcome, thereby addressing marketing's accountability issues (Webster et al., 2003). Specifically, the study relates brand awareness to various real market outcomes, including sales and brand market share, using both correlational and causal analysis. Second, this research links brand awareness to overall brand equity, considering both customer mindset and product market outcome measures of brand equity (Keller and Lehmann, 2003). Although previous research demonstrates a positive association between brand awareness and customer mindset brand equity (Kim and Kum, 2004, Yoo and Donthu, 2001 and Yoo et al., 2000), this result was confirmed on information from surveys only. In contrast, the present study utilizes real market time-series data. In addition, this research also explores the association between brand awareness and brand equity market outcome measures, including revenue premium, share premium, and price premium. Finally, the present study investigates the association between marketing mix elements and brand awareness. Specifically, this study examines price promotion's impact on brand awareness, shedding light on inconsistent results in extant literature. The next section reviews literature on brand awareness's relationship with market outcome, brand equity, and marketing mix elements. The latter sections propose research hypotheses, methodology and results, as well as a discussion of implications and future research directions.

This study provides an in-depth investigation of brand awareness, a scarcely researched topic, and makes three contributions. To address marketing's accountability issues, the present work explores whether or not a link exists between brand awareness and desirable market outcomes, such as sales and market share, and finds that brand awareness and market outcomes have a positive association. Second, this paper investigates the link between brand awareness and overall brand equity, a heavily researched topic with high practical relevance. The present work uses both customer mindset and product market outcome measures and demonstrates a positive association between brand awareness, customer mindset brand equity, and brand equity market outcome measures, including revenue premium, share premium and price premium. The current findings support the importance of brand awareness on market outcome metrics for low-involvement, consumer-packaged goods and generalize the past literature beyond the context of the service industry and survey-based methodology. However, this research finds that consumers' brand usage experience contributes more to brand awareness than vice versa. Experience precedes awareness in some cases. Finally, the present work investigates the association between marketing mix elements and brand awareness, finding price promotion's impact on brand awareness is positive. Price promotions increase brand awareness through creating brand exposure and usage experience for consumers. The current research confirms past literature that distribution intensity has the largest impact on brand awareness. This research has limitations providing challenges for further research. Firstly, the future research should replicate these results in other consumer-packaged goods categories, particularly fast-growing sectors with high levels of new product and advertising activities. To generalize the results, high-involvement decision products should be tested. Since consumers typically invest time and energy when gathering product information prior to purchase in high involvement categories, brand awareness may predict revenue premium (rather than vice versa) contrary to this study's findings. Furthermore, future research should compare the impact of brand awareness and brand liking, or brand image on sales (the authors thank an anonymous referee who offered this suggestion.). The impact of different brand equity constructs may be different across different product categories. Secondly, brand awareness includes both brand recall and brand recognition (Keller, 1993) but this study did not examine them separately. Future research should develop separate measures to assess brand recall and brand recognition respectively — further exploring their relationship with market outcomes. For other product categories, the impact of brand recall and brand recognition on market outcome may be different. The effects of marketing mix elements may also show differences on brand recall and brand recognition constructs. Thirdly, future research could improve the operationalization of the price promotion variable. The measure used in the present work, “percentage of sales made on price promotion”, neglects the depth and frequency of price promotion. Although managers were provided insight into the association between price promotion and brand equity, specifics on how to utilize price promotion in terms of the depth and frequency to improve brand awareness are lacking.