Marketing of brands with high awareness - A field experiment examining advertisements’ effect on sales numbers

Exposure to a brand has been shown to affect customers' behaviour towards it, and advertisements have a positive impact on raising brand awareness. However, when a strong brand has been developed over the years and a dominant brand or top of mind status is established, one can assume that the impact of advertisements decreases. The main objective of this thesis is to measure the effects of advertisements for a brand with high awareness. Our research question was examined by conducting a quasi-experiment. Real customers were exposed to advertisements in a field environment, and sales numbers were measured to reveal the effects on a selected high awareness brand. This master's thesis contains background research on the studied brand to get to know existing customer segments and develop suitable advertisements. The two advertisements acted as conditions in the independent variable and were analysed against a control period with no marketing activities. Data obtained from the cash register system in the respective conditions were analysed as dependent variables in an ANOVA analysis. Our results show that the effects of advertising individual products with high awareness are limited, while exposure has a significant impact on products that are less familiar in the market. Furthermore, the effects of advertisements in the long and short term differ between products with high and low awareness, even if both are related to the same high awareness brand. Our results complement the existing theory on exposure effects by extending it to brands with high awareness