Awareness and Respondent Perception Ratings
In marketing measurement there appears to be a steady drift away from a customer orientation (e.g. customer satisfaction) towards a market orientation such as Customer Value Analysis (CVA).
Customer Value Analysis is a market-oriented analysis measure that can assist suppliers in gaining an understanding of where their products and services are positioned within a market. This then enables suppliers to identify their competitive positioning, identify vulnerabilities and dynamically evaluate their competitive strategy. From a data collection perspective, CVA requires the researcher to capture the views of the customers (experience) and non-customers (perception) of the competing brands proportionally to the incidence of each brand's market share.
The challenge for analysis and for the respondent comes from the perception ratings. Non-customers should have some perception of a brand, be it well informed or hidden away in the unconscious. However, from an analysis point of view if a respondent has no view whatsoever of a brand, is the perception rating just noise? For example, a colleague recently participated in a survey to ask her opinion on Super 14 (provincial rugby union). Some way into the survey she discover that it was not 'racing cars' that she was rating. From an analysis perspective, has her ratings clouded the results or are her ratings valid?
Equally important is to consider the experience from the respondent’s perspective. Encouraging someone to rate a brand that they have no knowledge of must surely be a frustrating experience particularly rating “performance” attributes. The level of respondent frustration no doubt differs by product or service category. For example, in telecommunications where respondent awareness of the major brands is 90%+, non-customers have at least some perspective to draw on when providing rating however, in categories such as superannuation it is more of a stretch of the imagination. For example, many of the main Industry Fund brands remain largely unknown.
Some have argued that in the context of CVA and perception scores a 'wild guess' is a legitimate finding and moreover, a legitimate response. That is, such a response approximates how the market is working. I have never heard of Box Hill Tafe as a supplier of training but I know Box Hill is a middle –class, eastern suburb of Melbourne and Tafe is primarily for technical training so I will score accordingly.
Perhaps one solution for lowering respondent and model ambiguity is for non-customer ratings to be provided only at the overall price and quality level. This elevates the need to ask respondents without awareness to rate specific transactional-level questions. Alternatively, it could be argued that in actual market behavior a buyer only considers an evoked set of brands and therefore to better approximate the consumer behaviour a respondent should only rate brands from their own awareness set. The attractiveness of this argument is respondents will provide stronger associations (more stable models) and less respondent fatigue (presuming the greatest level of fatigue arises from rating something you have never heard of).
Customer Value Analysis is a market-oriented analysis measure that can assist suppliers in gaining an understanding of where their products and services are positioned within a market. This then enables suppliers to identify their competitive positioning, identify vulnerabilities and dynamically evaluate their competitive strategy. From a data collection perspective, CVA requires the researcher to capture the views of the customers (experience) and non-customers (perception) of the competing brands proportionally to the incidence of each brand's market share.
The challenge for analysis and for the respondent comes from the perception ratings. Non-customers should have some perception of a brand, be it well informed or hidden away in the unconscious. However, from an analysis point of view if a respondent has no view whatsoever of a brand, is the perception rating just noise? For example, a colleague recently participated in a survey to ask her opinion on Super 14 (provincial rugby union). Some way into the survey she discover that it was not 'racing cars' that she was rating. From an analysis perspective, has her ratings clouded the results or are her ratings valid?
Relieving Fatigue
Equally important is to consider the experience from the respondent’s perspective. Encouraging someone to rate a brand that they have no knowledge of must surely be a frustrating experience particularly rating “performance” attributes. The level of respondent frustration no doubt differs by product or service category. For example, in telecommunications where respondent awareness of the major brands is 90%+, non-customers have at least some perspective to draw on when providing rating however, in categories such as superannuation it is more of a stretch of the imagination. For example, many of the main Industry Fund brands remain largely unknown.
Some have argued that in the context of CVA and perception scores a 'wild guess' is a legitimate finding and moreover, a legitimate response. That is, such a response approximates how the market is working. I have never heard of Box Hill Tafe as a supplier of training but I know Box Hill is a middle –class, eastern suburb of Melbourne and Tafe is primarily for technical training so I will score accordingly.
Evoked Set
Perhaps one solution for lowering respondent and model ambiguity is for non-customer ratings to be provided only at the overall price and quality level. This elevates the need to ask respondents without awareness to rate specific transactional-level questions. Alternatively, it could be argued that in actual market behavior a buyer only considers an evoked set of brands and therefore to better approximate the consumer behaviour a respondent should only rate brands from their own awareness set. The attractiveness of this argument is respondents will provide stronger associations (more stable models) and less respondent fatigue (presuming the greatest level of fatigue arises from rating something you have never heard of).
