Following up on a previous post regarding measuring awareness and familiarity there are other questions that need to be addressed if we are to create a funnel. Why a funnel you ask? Funnels are commonly employed in brand tracking studies. This form of research requires a Structured Question & Structured Questionnaire that is deployed at specific intervals. They are often used to get a benchmark before embarking on an expensive advertising campaign. This method allows for pre and post-test measures which can be used as an adjunct measure for advertising effectiveness.
A funnel begins with awareness measures (unaided and aided), followed by a question regarding familiarity. Once we have an understanding of how savvy the market is to our brand we can dive deeper into the funnel.
The next two steps i
n the funnel include: consideration and likelihood to purchase. As with any funnel the width begins to narrow as soon as you have entered it. In other words the percentage of respondents who would consider a brand will be less than those that are familiar with it and so forth.
You can ask respondents “Of the brands you are familiar with which would you likely consider if you were to purchase a new cell phone?” This measure can be established as a pick list, or a scaled measure “On a scale of 0 – 9 how likely are you consider the following brands for purchase?” With the second option you as the researcher will need to set the cutoff point to determine which brands make it into the consideration set.
A question should be popping up right about now. We need to know if the participant is in the market for what we are selling. In this case it is acceptable to ask “How likely are you to purchase a new vehicle in the next six months?” Only those who are likely should be allowed to continue down the funnel.
At some point, though, we have to ask for the sale. In our survey this is the point where we ask participants to select the brand they are most likely to purchase. Only those respondents that are likely to purchase will see this question. So we have moved from awareness to purchase likelihood, does this mean we are done…no we have one more step…
