Hispanic auto shoppers consider an average of 5.1 brands over the course of their purchase journey, making them the demographic with the highest consideration – despite demonstrating low initial brand awareness. So finds a new report [download page] from Nielsen exploring how marketers can address a gap in brand awareness among multicultural groups.
The report, based on a series of quarterly surveys, found that consumers from some multicultural groups have a below-average awareness of auto brands. Based on how many brands consumers can recall, Hispanic consumers have both the lowest aided and unaided brand awareness compared to other groups.
Asian American and Black consumers also were found to have lower auto brand awareness than non-Hispanic White consumers.
Considering that purchase decisions are strongly linked to the brands that are part of a buyer’s initial consideration set, it’s crucial that this gap in awareness is addressed by marketers.
In fact, while Black and Hispanic consumers demonstrate below-average awareness of auto brands, they include an above-average amount in their consideration set over the course of their purchase journey. Overall, Hispanics consider the highest average number of brands (5.1), with Hispanic Gen-Xers in particular over-indexing (6.3) compared to the overall average of 3.6. Black consumers, too, consider an average of 4.9 brands, with Gen-X Black consumers considering 5.7 brands on average.
Asian-American consumers, however, more closely resemble non-Hispanic White consumers in the size of their consideration set.
Notably, within 3 months of a current search, the majority of brands considered by Black or Hispanic consumers are generated by aided awareness. For these same groups, four of the six brands they end up considering at the point of purchase are brands they didn’t initially consider.
As such, compared to previous research from McKinsey that found that brands in a consumer’s initial consideration set were twice as likely to be ultimately purchased, marketers are presented with a unique opportunity to make an impression on these multicultural consumers along the course of their purchase journey.
Read the full report here.
About the Data: Findings are based on quarterly surveys of 6,447 US adults (18+) conducted between Q1 2018 and Q2 2019.
