The weather was hot and the environment dusty as John, a social media marketer, and his friend, Bianca roamed the streets of Enugu looking for where to cool off. The duo spotted a popular fast food restaurant nearby.
They couldn’t believe the sight that greeted them. The atmosphere in the ‘eatery’ was rowdy. The music from the loudspeakers didn’t help issues. Customers were yelling orders at the attendants who seemed overwhelmed by the crowded atmosphere.
Added to this cacophony is the untidy environment. Used plates were left on several tables begging for clearing. Attendants wore a frown that summed up all that is happening around them. They seemed overwhelmed, underappreciated and overworked.
John and Bianca couldn’t get to order anything and left the place not eating and vowing never to return to that eatery or any of their franchise shops in any part of Nigeria again.
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Their experience was sour and unpleasant.
Recently a company took journalists on tour of its major outlets in Lagos to ensure they change the narrative about the brand’s perception. This particular brand has been suffering from wrong perception until the tour which hopes to be a game changer for them.
Unknown to many, it had been working internally to change the narrative and perception. Not until the tour, the perception about the brand was one that many customers had either written off or believed to be in decline.
Perception is everything.
Brand perception is the sum total of a customer’s encounter, experience and interactions with a brand. It determines the relationship between the customer and the brand going forward.
It can be a great tool for marketing for brands because it can encourage consumers to ‘spread the word’. It can also be a source of concern for brands suffering ‘downtime’.
Good brand perception can result in brand loyalty and brand affinity.
Many brands are suffering wrong brand perception because of what they have failed to do.
A lot of brands put up suggestion or complaint boxes in their business premises in order to gauge customers’ experience or encounter with the brand.
Available data show that many of these boxes are often empty, or in most cases, when customers take the time to drop a note, many of the complaints or suggestions are not taking into account.
When a consumer uses a product or service and promises to recommend to friends and never does so, the brand should be worried. A great experience lasts long and boomerangs in a nice way.
It is fair to say that most of what consumers tell market researchers are reasonably close to what they will eventually do or what they actually think. However, as neuro-marketing. (Neuromarketing uses neuroscience which is brain research to reveal subconscious decision-making processes), attitude and behaviour are not always firmly linked in the human mind. Several models of market research have been developed to address the different ways that consumers’ minds influence their purchase or patronage decisions.
When a consumer is predisposed to like a brand, they are said to have a brand affinity. But what factors lead to brand affinity. Current models suggest the four factors or dimensions of market research:
• Cognitive
• Emotional
• Language
• Action
Most market researches rely on the language model to understand consumer behaviour. This means that the consumers’ beliefs, feelings, and behaviour must all be inferred from what consumers say.
According to Pepe Martinez, author of The Consumer Mind, consumers often contradict themselves. On the one hand, consumers tend to act on their feelings but they consciously report what they believe they are thinking.
According to Pepe Martinez, market researchers are faced with these complex tasks like:
• The task of analysing consumer feedback
• Isolating the most relevant information
• Making interpretations and forecasts based on their overall knowledge of what is probable, if not actual.
In other words, if a market researcher cannot know with certainty what the consumer believes or is likely to do, then the market researcher must draw from the body of consumer knowledge, his or her own market research experience, and what he or she understands human nature to be.
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That is unless the market researcher is employing neuro-marketing.
When a brand is coherent and genuine, consumers know
Consumer values and consumer emotions are revealed by what consumers say. Consumer emotions convey meanings and feelings about brands. Through the creation of meaning and feelings, consumers are able to achieve consonance between brands and their intentions – if not their actions.
In other words, the genuineness of the consumer-brand engagement is based on feelings that are generated by the brand in individual consumers. The brand coherence depends on the strength of the relationship between the brand message and the feelings and meaning the consumer derives from the brand message.
