Comparative Methods: Brand based Comparative Approaches, Marketing Based Comparative Approaches, Conjoint Analysis

Comparative Methods uses experiments to examine consumer attitudes and behavior toward a brand to assess benefits arising from having high awareness and strong, favorable, and unique brand associations.

Brand based Comparative Approaches

Brand-based comparative methods measure the response that consumers have to the similar marketing efforts of different companies. So these methods basically compare your marketing efforts to the marketing efforts of your direct competitors, industry leaders, or non-existing brands.

The most famous example of this comparative method is Larry Percy’s experiment. Percy concluded that knowing the brand of the product deeply influences your opinion on the quality and the overall product itself. By disclosing (or not disclosing) the brand names of products, Percy found that brand loyalty is higher when people are aware of the brand.

The downfalls of these methods are that it measures only the isolated value of the brand name. These methods are useful if you’re looking to change your marketing programme and want to predict how that might affect the future outcome.

Marketing Based Comparative Approaches

Marketing-based comparative methods measure the difference in the outcome of different marketing strategies implemented by the same brand, for the same products. These methods focus on the levels of influence different marketing programmes have on the overall brand performance.

Comparing prices with competitors and analysing how their pricing strategy influenced the brand equity is really important. It will help you find the consumer’s breaking point and their level of tolerance the point when they abandon brand loyalty due to high prices and switch to a different brand.

These methods can also help you understand how customer responses vary in different locations. What’s more, these methods can be applied always, no matter what your marketing strategy is. However, marketing-based comparative methods can’t determine the consumer’s preference. In other words, they can’t pinpoint whether the consumer has a preference toward a certain brand or toward a specific product category.

Conjoint Analysis Comparative Approaches

Conjoined comparative marketing methods combine both comparative methods. They analyse both the brand and the marketing efforts. Because they are so extensive, these methods allow you to analyse different brand attributes and brand associations, as well as their interdependent relationships. Conjoined comparative methods have a big disadvantage they are known to increase customer’s expectations.