Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU)
This article covers meaning, importance & example of Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU) from marketing perspective.
What is Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU)?
Awareness, Attitude and Usage or AAU is a type of market study implemented by a company to understand their market presence popularity and strength. The AAU research guides the marketers to quantify their brand in terms of popularity, recognition, usage and market dominance.
Awareness, Attitude and Usage is divided into three parts where the first part, awareness, defines the percentage of population who are aware of the brand’s presence in the market among other existing brands. Advertising awareness helps the marketer to understand the success of their latest advertising campaign and ponder over the next marketing move to improve knowledge and visibility about their product to the target audience. The second part, attitude, answers about the reputation of the brand in the mind of the customers, which helps the company in either consolidating or changing their brand positioning. The final part of AAU, usage, is directly linked with the sales figure as it portrays the number, frequency and the timings of purchase along with the behavior and the thought process of the consumer while purchasing the product.
Importance of Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU)
The Awareness, Attitude and Usage concept finds its importance in the following domains:
1. The first and the foremost usage of the AAU research method is to test the effectiveness of an advertisement. The research is conducted to gather information about the success of an advertisement in the market by formulating various questions related to the awareness of the brand in the minds of the customer, their attitude towards the particular brand and their change in buying preference after the advertisement.
2. The AAU research method helps to identify a brand’s competitor in the market and analyse their strength and weakness compared to other brands as perceived by the consumers. The questions on awareness of the brand also makes the company identify their market presence and familiarity of their brand amongst all the competitors in the market.
3. Awareness, Attitude and Usage also helps to understand general perceptions, beliefs, and psychological behavior of the target demographics of customers, mostly in a particular geographic location, which assists the brand to accordingly change either their product or their marketing communication and advertisement techniques to reach out to those targeted customers.
4. After launching a new product, the fluctuations or frustrations in sales figure is made to be understood by the AAU research method. The research answers whether the selling strategy developed by the company is actually effective to the customers or not. It helps to understand the barriers in the minds of the customers which is affecting the progress of the product. It clearly helps the company identify the problem which maybe either competitor presence, mismatch positioning, advertising faults or maybe lack of knowledge about the product in the customer’s mind and act upon it.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU)
Some advantages of AAU method are:
1. Test the effectiveness of an advertisement in the market
2. Identify major Competitors in the market
3. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the product
4. Understanding the mindset and psychological behavior of the targeted customers
5. Indicate the best way to position the brand
6. Uncover people’s attitude towards the brand
7. Gather relevant information for the sales force to re-strategize their selling methods
Certain disadvantages of AAU are:
1. The respondents should not be told about the research beforehand. The research goes into waste if the respondents does secondary market study before the survey
2. Questions are being asked randomly and therefore the answers are impromptu which does not always signify the correct answer.
3. People might not remember the name of the brand while being questioned, although they might be familiar with it
4. People’s perception and usage pattern does not always answer the reasons in decreasing or fluctuating sales
5. The research is limited to a particular demography and geographical segments as different age group of people in different locations tend to differ in their knowledge and opinion
Example of Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU)
L’Oréal Paris conducted an Awareness, Attitude and Usage research method to understand the customer preference of their brand, their brand equity and its market presence. The company conducted the research on all women of different age groups in a particular state, asking them various questions on what product comes in their mind when talked about beauty and skincare to understand their brand awareness. Questions were also asked what beauty and skincare problems they face and what kind of product do they expect in the market. This answers the attitude of the customers in buying the product and choosing their brand. The research was a success as L’Oréal understood that their brand is being preferred by 69% of the sample population. They understood the factors that leads to the trending buying pattern so that they could improvise those factors in developing new future products. The mode of communication being preferred by the consumers were also found out.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Awareness, Attitude and Usage (AAU) along with its overview.
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