Brand engagement study - investigating the young mother’s relationship with the small car market

Women with kids have a significant influence over household spending and are therefore an important audience for advertisers to understand. Aside from this – women with children are not considered to be your typical online audience and we wanted to demonstrate the internet’s relevance to all demographics. With this in mind, the first of the four studies was carried out in the small car market sector and examined a sample of 1,000 women with kids. They had to have bought a car in the last three months or be seriously considering buying one in the next 12 months.

The internet was the primary tool in the car purchasing process – highlighted in both the qualitative and quantitative research. Through attitudinal questioning we found that three attitudes held the key to brand engagement in this sector:

‘I like the shape’
‘This is a car for someone like me’
‘This is a fun car’

Model of Brand Engagement

Seven key factors, made up of sixteen brand perceptions

Impact of brand communications: Online advertising has most impact

With the 25 statements broken out into seven engagement factors we found that ‘style’ and ‘fun’ made up 64% of brand engagement (the statement ‘is a feminine car’ was also included under ‘fun’).

We found that in the small car market, online delivered on average 39.9% of brand engagement in the advertising mix. This compares to 36.6% for press, 17.6% for TV, 3.9% for outdoor and just 2% for radio. TV appeared to drive brand stature whilst online and press worked on key model attributes. Both the qualitative and the quantitative research showed that these women are more likely to look for information and reviews about cars online than offline (this being second only to personal recommendation) and that online aids them in their car purchase decision making process. They are therefore already engaged with the online medium. The fact that these women have very little historical information about the brands in this market means they need a more in-depth level of information than traditional media can provide. Therefore, online is having a greater effect on their engagement, in this case, than TV which is unable to provide the level of detail required.

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