Brand meaning and children: A thematic categorisation task
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TERESA DAVIS is Senior Lecturer of Marketing, School of Business, University of Sydney.
Keywords
Abstract
brand meaning; hierarchical categorisation procedure;TCAT; HCAT
This study uses a thematic categorisation task that has been especially designed and developed for use among child subjects to elicit and measure brand meaning. This is based on the hierarchical categorisation procedure suggested by Oakenfull, Blair, Gelb and Dacin. The method uses a pictorial sorting task to ensure that the categorisation of brands is more compatible with children’s tendency to sort thematically rather than taxonomically. The method is offered as a tool that brand managers can use to identify ‘core brand attributes’ as well as to evaluate possible brand extensions.
Journal of Brand Management (2007) 14, 255–266. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550068
INTRODUCTION Brand meaning has been defined as the ‘core attributes’ of what the brand means to consumers.1,2 This study identifies the most ‘definitive’ attributes of a brand and use this as a basis for identifying possible brand extensions. Potential preferred products for brand extensions are identified based on established brands. Co-relational analyses of the resulting list of products and brand attributes explored the predictive value of this procedure. Identifying and developing successful brand extensions within the fickle children’s market has always been a challenging task for brand managers. This procedure is a useful method that helps to understand children’s unique categorisation strategies and for more appropriate brand extension planning and segmentation. Teresa Davis Discipline of Marketing, School of Business, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Tel: + 61 2 9351 8781; Fax: + 61 2 9351 6732; E-mail: [email protected]
BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE Research in the area of children’s understanding of brands and brand extensions3,4 has focused mostly on the brand name
and the similarity evaluations of possible brand extensions. The above-mentioned articles suggest that children in the preoperational age5 (cognitive developmental age usually below 7 years of age) tend to use the peripheral cues of the brand name and physical product to assess it. Size, packaging, colour and the sound of the brand name playing a more critical part in their assessment and classification of brands than when adults engage in the same task. Macklin6 shows similar results when using a pre-schooler sample of children. While brand name is, however, a core part of the brand and its meaning, it does not completely explain the reasons why children, in the absence of category similarity cues choose to favour what adult consumers would categorise as a ‘natural far category’ relative to the parent brand. This study, therefore, attempts to understand these differences in categorisation that appear to have important implications for making strategic decisions about children’s products and possible brand extensions. A large proportion of the new products launched every year in the marketpla
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