Q: What is consumer response hierarchy?
Ans: Consumer response hierarchy is marketing speak for how consumers go about making decisions in different categories. Essentially, how they react to marketing stimulus by various different brands in a category and how they form the decision to purchase and stay loyal to brands.
Q: How does it benefit brand managers?
Ans: Consumer decision process is the utopia that every brand manager would want to look at. Its understanding how consumers make decisions in categories, what are the different perceptions, how they interact in helping the consumer make the final choice. If the brand managers know this, they know how to advertise smarter and drive their marketing stimulus better toned to the consumers needs and what is relevant to the consumers.
Q: Can you share some examples of WNS work in consumer response modeling?
Ans: We are actually doing a lot of work modeling consumer response, which is helping brand managers. We are working across may be 25 plus categories, where we are trying to plot out how the consumers think about making brand choices. It is helping brand managers in validating their brand architecture, which is basically a framework they use to define the essence of the brand, and it is helping them validate the architecture by making it more relevant from the consumer side.
The other area where they are also immensely benefiting is in the area of new product development, where they are able to improve their product offering by testing it with consumers and how they respond to the new product proposition. Various advanced modeling techniques like structural equation modeling exist, we are able to use the technique to kind of guide the clients in terms of thinking how owning any particular consumer perception or theme as it is called in parlance could improve their intention to purchase of a certain brand by x% points.