Most consumers would agree that quality is an important factor in determining the products and services they use. Yet each consumer has a different definition of quality. For some, it's an automobile that gives years of trouble-free service. For others, it's a restaurant where the service is always fast and the food is always delicious. Quality is a complex issue with many different components. Now in its second year, Total Research Corporation's EQUITREND study is a step towards defining those components more clearly.

Through telephone interviews with 2,000 men and women age 15 and older, EQUITREND measures the brand equity of 190 brands in 55 product and service categories (roughly 1/3 packaged goods, 1/3 durable goods, and 1/3 services) from long distance service to candy bars. Consumers were asked to respond to a list of brands in terms of their perception of each brand's quality. They were also asked about usage behavior and their level of satisfaction with the products and services. The EQUITREND study not only resulted in a ranking of brands based on consumer perceptions of quality, it also allowed for the creation of a segmentation system based on those perceptions.

Test theories

John Morton, senior vice president, director of advanced statistical research, Total Research Corp., says that the idea for creating the EQUITREND study came from the desire to test some theories that Total Research had about what can and can't be measured in consumer research.

"Our experience has been that even if you're trying to understand consumers in a very deep and esoteric way, the simpler the questioning procedure and the more you use real concrete things as opposed to abstractions the more useful your results will be. We wanted to develop a study that would be very germane to the whole issue of brand. We also wanted to develop a study that people would have no trouble responding to, that would elicit honest answers that had real meaning."

To react to each of the brands names read to them, respondents used a ten-point scale that had 10 as a measure of extraordinary quality, 5 quite acceptable, and 0 unacceptable. "One of the things about this scale is that 5 is quite acceptable and yet we give people five levels above quite acceptable to grade brands. The reason that we did that was that our past research had found that if you use 'excellent-good-fair-poor' or even 'excellent-very good-fair-poor' you get so many responses in the top two scale points that you haven't really gotten any information. Anybody who feels half decent about the brand would put it at the top of the scale or next to the top of the scale. So we were trying to develop a much more sensitive scaling procedure."

Total Research has identified seven primary factors of brand image that consumers use to evaluate a brand's quality. Each person weights these factors differently. Some of the factors include:

  • Sophistication - The more intellectual or sophisticated a brand appears to be, the higher the quality is.
  • Wholesomeness - The brand has an image of being nurturing and caring, thus it is a quality brand.
  • Wide acceptance - "There are a lot of people who believe that the brands that are the most widely accepted are the best brands, brands like Kodak, Campbell Soups, Hershey," Morton says.
  • Trendiness or stylishness - The people who weight this factor the heaviest are the opposite of those who put a great deal of emphasis on a brand's level of acceptance, Morton says. "If something's been around a long time, they're not interested in it. They see quality as something that's constantly evolving."

The brands that scored the best in the Equitrend study seem to blend sophistication and wholesomeness. "If you look at the brands that finished at the very top in perceived quality, they are the ones like Kodak film, which provides a technically sophisticated product but has a lot of wholesome imagery associated with it. CNN is another example. It has a kind of patriotic image because of the Gulf War coverage but also it's a technically sophisticated product. IBM and AT&T are two other brands that combine these two traits."

On the other hand, two brands that scored in the top twenty - Hallmark Cards and Mercedes-Benz - do very well with images that are dominated by only one factor, wholesomeness for Hallmark and sophistication for Mercedes-Benz. And the results show that brands can successfully combine factors other than wholesomeness or sophistication and still do well.

Cross-category

Another goal of EQUITREND was to provide a way to compare several different brands, especially those in different industries and service categories. "The companies that make these brands have millions of dollars of research that looks at the brands versus their competitors. Our job wasn't to duplicate that work, it was to look at the brands in a cross-category context. For example, when we look at American Express card we can certainly look at it versus Master Card and Visa, but we're also very interested in American Express and its similarities and dissimilarities to all the other brands we tested."

Using perceptual maps, the brands are plotted according to their image in the eyes of the consumers, providing a look at how the brands perform compared to many other brands, not just those in their product or service category.

"You might expect that when you put brands from all these different categories into a perceptual map that you'd end up with all the candy bars together and all the sodas together and that there would be 34 little pockets of brands but it's not like that at all. Brands can be spread all over the place. For example, Pepsi has a much different market position than Coke does. Typically a brand is likely to be more similar to non-members of its category than members of its category in terms of its imagery and positioning."

From Total Research's point of view, this cross-category analysis allows marketers to see the big picture, to learn how their brand relates to competitors and brands outside of their specific product or service category - something that marketing research doesn't always allow, Morton says.

"The trouble with 99.9% of market research is, it only looks at one category and it tries to figure out why people do what they do just based on exhaustive information about that one category. It takes consumers into levels of detail that are five quantum leaps beyond the level that they actually think at when they make their product selections.

"I might be the researcher on Maxwell House coffee, for example, and I'm spending 50 hours a week thinking about nothing but Maxwell House coffee. I develop this study where I ask consumers an hour's worth of questions about all the different coffee brands and get them rated by 10 occasions on 50 attributes by 4 different kinds of users. But the consumer's decision may be instantaneous, made without hardly any thought at all and is probably more a reflection of their general model as consumers than any kind of in-depth models that they have of the coffee market.

"The feeling that we have developed over a lot of these studies is that people don't have a separate decision model for each market that they have to make selections in. If they did it would be a nightmare to be a consumer. Most consumer choices are very casual. The overall model may be very well thought out in terms of a consumer saying, 'I'm primarily sophisticated but I also have a certain level of practicality to my choice and I certainly lean toward the trendy brand.' What we think is really exhaustive and stable is the person's overall model."

Quality=sales

For those firms that still need convincing that the pursuit of quality makes more than just good public relations sense, EQUITREND results show the effect quality can have on a company's bottom line. "We've found in general that for any given brand, each step up the scale is associated with about a 30% increase in sales. So if a brand's overall score was 6.00 and it can move to 7.00, that's about a 30% increase in unit sales," Morton says.