The Influences of Brand Awareness on Consumers' Cognitive Process: An Event-Related Potentials Study.

Xuefeng Zhang

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.00549

Abstract

Brand awareness plays an important role in most aspects of marketing. However, consumers’ cognitive process of brand awareness, which plays an important role in purchase decision or product usage experiences, is still unclear in the brain. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the influences of two different brand awareness on consumers’ cognitive process was investigated. Phone pictures with high or low brand awareness and girl pictures were used to carry out this experiment research. An amended oddball task was designed in which girl photos were taken as target stimuli, and phone pictures were taken as non-target stimuli. Subjects were asked to identify the girl pictures. Smaller ERPs components N2 and P3 along with high brand awareness phone pictures were found compared to the low brand awareness ones. The amplitude variation in N2 and P3 indicated that the cognitive process of identification and attention distribution were changed along with the magnitude of brand awareness, which meant consumers could allocate different attention resources to distinguish high or low brand awareness product unconsciously. This may indicate the identification and attention distribution caused by brand awareness can be detected by N2 and P3, and event-related potentials methodology may be a sensitive measurement technique for brand awareness.

Highlights

As is known to all, brand awareness plays an important role in consumer decision-making, market performance, marketing mix, and brand equity. Keller (2008) have pointed out that brand awareness refers to whether consumers can recall or recognize a brand, or whether consumers know about a brand
Combining raw waveforms with variance analysis, our study demonstrated that the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher N2 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region, and the highest amplitude of N2 appeared on the Fz electrode when the low brand awareness appeared
Similar to the N2 component, our study demonstrated that the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher P3 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region, and the highest amplitude of P3 appeared in the middle of Fz-Cz electrode when the low brand awareness appeared

Summary

Introduction

As is known to all, brand awareness plays an important role in consumer decision-making, market performance, marketing mix, and brand equity. Keller (2008) have pointed out that brand awareness refers to whether consumers can recall or recognize a brand, or whether consumers know about a brand. As is known to all, brand awareness plays an important role in consumer decision-making, market performance, marketing mix, and brand equity. Keller (2008) have pointed out that brand awareness refers to whether consumers can recall or recognize a brand, or whether consumers know about a brand. Scholars have conducted extensive research on the two important aspects of brand awareness, brand recognition and recall. Most scholars have reached a consensus that brands recognition and recall are important while consumers are making purchase decisions (Emma and Sharp, 2000; Thoma and Williams, 2013) and evaluating product usage experience (Huang and Sarigoellue, 2012; Stach, 2019) or product quality (Huang and Sarigoellue, 2012). Brand recognition and recall affect consumer attitudes and emotion (Rossiter, 2014; Wilson et al, 2015; Xu et al, 2015), even the firm performance (Grundey and Bakowska, 2008; Homburg et al, 2010)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion