Understanding brand rating evaluations: A look at instrument design format and its influences on consumer processing styles

Marketing managers devote countless resources to determining their brand's positioning amongst its competitors. Commonly, marketing research is conducted to ascertain the positioning of the brand's ratings on product category centered attributes. However, it is often not clear whether the brand is truly strong or weak relative to a competitor on a particular attribute, as it is possible that the rating is a simple result of the consumer's holistic impression of the brand. This research aims to help solve this dilemma by adding to the theory of rating instrument design. In this research, brand rating instrument response format and information presentation format prior to the task of brand rating is further investigated. The paper looks at the manner in which the brands and attributes are structured in a rating instrument to determine if these varying formats alter the consumer's ability to process the information during the rating task.;By using a constrained components analysis to decompose the brand ratings into brand-specific attributes and global impressions, the research adds to the theory that most consumers choose to process brand ratings by attribute. In other words, the consumer most often chooses to focus on one of the multiple attributes and rate the various brands on that attribute before moving on to the next attribute. The research finds that this type of processing leads to strong brand-specific associations. However, when a consumer is faced with the alternative of only one brand to focus on at a time, but asked to rate that brand across multiple attributes, the consumer is not capable of comparing and contrasting with other brands. Therefore, in this scenario, the consumer utilizes existing holistic impressions of the brand to rate the multitude of attributes. This often leads to halo error and thus biasing the attribute ratings. While results from this processing style have its merits, most managers are mostly motivated to eliminate it in the hopes of pinpointing their brand's true strengths and weaknesses.