The Pedagogy of Choosing Brand Exemplars in Marketing Classrooms (2014)

IntroductionThe authors in this study developed a pedagogical innovation to allow faculty to determine the recall value of a brand among a set of students. The Brand Recall Index (BRI) is an objective measurement of the familiarity of a brand. Generally speaking, the familiarity of a brand can lead to a preference for the brand (Aaker, 2011), especially when the familiar brand is positioned next to a less familiar brand (Bogart & Lehman, 1973). Therefore, knowing the degree to which a brand is recalled by a set of students will allow faculty to understand the level of preference the target audience has of the brand. As such, faculty will be able to discuss branding and brand building with the brands that are more relevant for the audience, thereby serving to engage students in the classroom and beyond.For this study, the authors chose to focus on the target audience of Generation Y or The Millennial Generation (Coates, 2007). Millennials are variously defined as those born between the years of the 1980's to the early 2000's. While the range depends upon the source referenced, there is little argument that this generation is worthy of much consideration (Sago, 2010). Larger than the Baby Boomer Generation (Fromm, 2011), millennials are the children of the Boomers and therefore have been brought up as optimistic, confident (Coates, 2007), and some would even say opinionated decision makers; especially those decisions regarding trends, style, and buying (Fromm, 2011; Uhland, 2007; Waters, 2006). Generation Y is also of interest due to its academic preferences (Ng, Schweitzer, & Lyons, 2010), working styles (Levenson, 2010), and spending patterns (Pinto, 2010). As the next demographic spending behemoth, millennials must be better understood by marketers in order to influence their perspectives on branding (Lodes & Buff, 2009) and how their participation in a brand community affects consumer-brand relationships and brand attitudes (Lee & Kang, 2013). Millennials' involvement on social media suggests that we must better understand their role of content strategy within social media brand communities (Chauhan & Pillai, 2013) and how it relates to their satisfaction levels (Casidy, 2013). Business instructors must attend to millennials as they comprise the majority of students taught every day. The remainder of the paper includes a review of the brand recall and familiarity literature followed by the methodology used to develop the brand recall index, the results of the study, and finally the pedagogical implications of the findings.Brand Recall and Construct AccessibilityBrand recall is the extent to which a brand name is remembered, whether spontaneously (unaided recall) or in association with a cue (aided recall). Brand recall and brand familiarity are terms that are often used interchangeably in branding research and are considered dimensions of overall brand awareness (Aaker, 2011). Researchers have studied recall in terms of the word names of brands as well as the non-word names of brands (Lerman & Garbarino, 2002), including a symbol, logo, character, slogan and any other vehicle used to connote the brand.In developing the brand recall index the authors relied on extant research on knowledge activation based information processing theories (Higgins, 1996; Keller, 1993). According to these theories, brand knowledge is stored as an associative network of information relating to the brand (Keller, 1993).Consumers depend on this information in two different ways while making judgments such as when deciding on a brand. First, the knowledge content in the information helps the judgment process. Thus, when the Toyota brand is brought to mind, the associated knowledge content regarding Japan as its country of origin, the brand's reputation for quality, and its durability feed into the decision process. A second, perhaps more important aspect, is the metacognitive experience of recall when thinking about the category. …