The influence of brand usage on responses to advertising awareness measures

While there are many measures of advertising awareness, there are few guidelines about which of these a researcher should select. We examine how using the brand influences consumer responses to three measures commonly used in advertising tracking instruments. We find that for both top-of-mind and total unprompted advertising awareness measures, brand users are about 2.5 times more likely to recall advertising exposure than non-users; however, this ratio was lower for brand-prompted advertising awareness, with brand users only about 1.7 times more likely than non-users. This, we find, is because non-users respond more to brand-prompted advertising awareness measures. This result influences the scores for small brands, which get 80% of their responses from non-users only when they are prompted with the brand name. Our conclusion is therefore that scores from different advertising awareness measures are not directly comparable, unless split Into separate brand user/non-user groups. Further, practitioners interested in the results for small-share or new brands should use brand-prompted measures, otherwise they risk underestimating the advertising reach and effectiveness of these brands.