The Underlying Structure of Brand Awareness Scores

There are three classical measures of brand awareness: aided, spontaneous, and top-of-mind. The relationships between these measures, across a set of brands in the same product category, are close, but highly nonlinear. We show that these relationships can be linearized, in all product classes, by performing a logistic transformation on each measure. This amounts to describing the process by which consumers answer awareness questions by a Rasch model, originally proposed to describe the success of students in answering exam questions. The brand's salience is equivalent to the students' competence, and the difficulty of the awareness question is equivalent to the test difficulty. We briefly summarize the research process that led to this empirical generalization. Managerial implications are described, mainly linked to the diagnosis of “locked” versus “open” product categories.