Viva La Diference! - Global Research finds significant regional differences in consumer choice behaviour

In this age of global brands and global marketing, it is refreshing to find hard evidence that people around the world do not all think about brands the same way.

We are just completing a major piece of consumer research across six continents. We have analysed what drives consumer choice between brands in a particular category of brown goods – purchases of things that people only buy occasionally, and only when they actually need to replace the one they have. There are some famous international brands in the category, but it is not a high interest category, and often a distressed purchase. The research has involved over 16,000 consumers around the world, with at least 1,000 in each country, and included online research, face-to-face interviews, and consumer observation at the point of purchase.

As well as gathering the usual data on awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty, and asking people directly what influenced their choice of brands, we asked each consumer to rate their brand against 40 attributes.  We then used factor analysis to group these attributes into a smaller number of independent factors: sets of attributes that consumers are, perhaps unconsciously, mentally grouping when they make choices in the category. Using statistical techniques, we analysed these factors to determine which are most significant in driving brand selection.

Understanding what actually drives demand, as opposed to just finding what people claim is influencing them, is important. In surveys consumers tend to give the answers that they think they should, or think will show them in the best possible light, so to try to appear logical. They therefore tend to overstate the rational factors, and many understate or deny being influenced by emotional factors or advertising. Demand driver analysis enables us to derive what is actually influencing choice of brand. This knowledge is invaluable when it comes to establishing an effective brand positioning and efficient marketing campaigns.

Our research supported some national stereotypes. For example, German consumers were significantly more likely than others to research their purchase in advance and to be influenced by hard data, such as independent test results.

Other regional findings were more surprising. If we judge customer sophistication by the number of different independent factors that they take into account when choosing between brands, then many Westerners would have expected the Europeans or North Americans to be the most sophisticated. This wasn’t true. We weren’t the least sophisticated – that proved to be the Brazilians, who seem to wrap everything in this category into one composite factor of “is it good?”. But the most sophisticated proved to be the Nigerians, who took a much broader range of factors into account and who, incidentally, could all name the brand they currently owned, which wasn’t true anywhere else in the world. It is true that one of the sampling criteria was did they already own a brand in the category, which would have cut out quite a lot of the poorer Nigerians, but that sampling criteria was used in all markets, so the international comparison is valid.

In creating global brands, it is easy and not uncommon for managers to assume that consumers around the world are similar and think in the same way within a category. But if they don’t understand how ways of choosing between brands differ from country to country, as well as which desires are common, they could easily be making mistakes and wasting money.