How do consumers come to buy a new brand?

The first of three JOAB ('Justifying Our Advertising Budgets') papers published by Admap. JOAB is a project run by the South Bank Business School, researching fundamental questions about how advertising works.

How do consumers come to buy a new brand?

Andrew S C Ehrenberg
THIS ARTICLE considers advertising's role in consumers buying a new brand, or an existing brand that is new to them. More generally, how do consumers' more-or-less steady propensities to buy a brand evolve initially? And the key question perhaps: how do some brands come to be much bigger than others?

We use a single model of consumer behaviour, Awareness, Trial, Reinforcement and Nudging (ATR&N), to cover both new and established brands. This has four broad stages.

  • Awareness: consciousness of the new brand X tends...

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