Brand Associations
Mental associations that consumers have with a brand directly affect their purchasing decisions.
But do you know what consumers explicitly and implicitly associate with your brand?
Businesses that don’t do good quality market research are missing out and have no idea about consumer behaviour that could give them competitive advantage.
Brand associations are images and feelings that a consumer can have with a brand, product or service.
They can be described as attributes such as, trusted, premium, engaging, reliable, inspiring, and so on.
Brand associations provide knowledge about your market category and about your consumers and those of your competitors.
Understanding how your brand is perceived at both explicit and implicit levels can yield competitive advantage.
Explicit responses and implicit reaction time tests (IRTs) are the best combined approaches to measure brand associations. This is because IRTs measure subconscious beliefs and attitudes (System 1), while explicit responses measure conscious, verbalisable feelings (System 2).
Measuring both will give you a 360 degree view of your brand and its category. Measuring those of competitors too, can yield deeper insights into the threats and opportunities in a market category.
Implicit market research can provide insights that brand managers and market researchers can use to avert a crisis and a downward trend in market share. It can raise red flags.
Implicit market research promises to unlock deep seated consumer attitudes. Using the analogy of an archaeological dig, implicit tests, like Split Second’s Impress Test, can help uncover the hidden drivers in the consumer’s mind. They can also narrow the truth gap – the gap between what consumers can verbalise explicitly and how they actually behave as shoppers.
These subconscious associations happen in a split-second and are virtually impossible to fake
Online, objective and cost-effective, IRTs capture immediate, intuitive, gut reactions or subconscious responses. This can be applied to brands, campaigns, new product concepts, packaging designs and any other marketing asset. Free from the biases of conscious rationalisation inherent in quantitative and qualitative research, IRTs offer marketers a chance to study consumers at a deep, emotional level and predict their behaviour more accurately than has previously been possible.
Read a case study to see what they can do. In this example, our implicit association tests produced better predictions than traditional self-report questions. In particular, they showed which kinds of promotions for Coca-Cola products would yield the most sales.
Consumers answering traditional surveys said that they wanted one type of offer, but behaved in a different way when they were in the store.
The way they actually behaved was just as our implicit tests indicated they would.
We provide good quality market research, using a range of implicit response techniques that are founded in neuroscience.
So, what’s the evidence? What can implicit reaction time tests tell us about consumer attitudes and intentions that traditional, explicit, methods cannot?
Predictive Ability
One way to test whether implicit reaction time tests, such as Split Second’s Impress Test, can measure anything useful about consumer attitudes and intentions might be to look for the predictive ability of implicit and explicit tests – are there circumstances in which either or both of these measures are strongly related to the purchasing behaviours of consumers.
There are numerous examples in the peer-reviewed literature demonstrating that in many circumstances implicit attitudes are better predictors of subsequent behaviour than explicit responses provided at the same time.
GAP
For example, Steinman and Karpinski (2009) found that implicit but not explicit attitudes towards the brand GAP predicted GAP patronage and buying intentions. Brunel, Tietje and Greenwald (2004) showed that implicit methods can detect attitudes about brands that explicit measures cannot (e.g., how different races advocated different patterns of brand preferences implicitly but not explicitly).
Other Research
Research includes Priluck and Till (2009) who found that explicit and implicit measures were both good at detecting attitudinal differences between brands when the difference was large or obvious, but only implicit methods could detect differences when they are less obvious. Other research shows that implicit methods in a consumer context are difficult to fake.
For example, Chan and Sengupta (2010) found that while the claims of an advertisement were dismissed, implicit responses revealed that the ad had induced favourable attitudes to the brand.
An interesting study published in 2010 by a team of researchers in Italy headed by from Michelangelo Vianello, shows how important it is to assess true feelings as opposed to those that people like to state in order to present themselves in a favourable light. College students were given two different measures of conscientiousness, one was a traditional explicit personality self-report questionnaire and the other was an implicit reaction time test whose attributes focussed on conscientiousness. Half of the students were further told to imagine that they were being tested for their ideal job (one with a good income, low effort, and so on) and the half were not told this. Those with the job-story scored higher on conscientiousness but only on the self-report test. This shows that they could give biased answers and present themselves in a very favourable light. Yet, both groups scored about the same on the implicit measure – this is remarkable because it shows that the implicit measure was not so easy to fake.
A recent review of the implicit association test and implicit response testing, reveals that it is a very impressive approach (Ratliff & Smith, 2024). It concludes that the implicit association test has been “evaluated as rigorously as any psychological measure, and has largely stood up to scrutiny” (p. 61).
In terms of detecting consumer preferences, a recent example shows that implicit attitudes can detect real differences where explicit attitudes failed to (Plotka, Urbane, & Blumenau, 2024).
References
Brunel, F.F., Tietjie, B. & Greenwald, A.G. (2004). Is the implicit association test a valid and valuable measure of implicit consumer social cognition? Marketing, 4, 385-404. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1404_8
Chan, E. & Sengupta, J., (2010). Insincere flattery actually works: A dual attitudes perspective. Journal of Marketing Research, 47, 122-133. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122
Plotka, I., Urbane, B., & Blumenau, N. (2024). Affective and Cognitive Bases of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes towards Domestic and Foreign Food Brands. In Sorrentino et al., (eds) Brand Awareness – Recent Advances and Perspectives.
Priluck, R. & Till, B. D. (2010). Comparing a customer-based brand equity scale with the Implicit Association Test in examining consumer responses to brands. Brand Management, 17, 413-428. https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2009.32
Ratliff, K. A., & Smith, C. T. (2024). The Implicit Association Test. Daedalus, 153(1), 51-64. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02048
Steinman, R. B. & Karpinski, A. (2009). The breadth-based adjective rating task as an indirect measure of consumer attitudes. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 37, 173-174. http://dx.doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2009.37.2.173
Feedback from our Global Clients
Academic studies like this provide very strong evidence of the usefulness of implicit reaction time tests.
In addition to such studies, Split Second Research has a wealth of evidence from our own R&D and project work with clients to show how powerful the technique is.
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To read case studies specific to your field, or to learn more about our methods, please contact us.
