We believe it is dangerous to set research and creativity against each other, and we think it is equally wrong to omit one of these stages in decision-making.
Present day competition forces firms to keep in constant touch with market investigations. The market is presented as something unknown and heterogeneous. In it are intermingled qualitative factors (such as tastes, habits) and quantitative factors (such as population, income levels etc.) as well as the variables directly controllable by the company such as prices, conditions, qualities, packaging, publicity, distribution channels etc. and within these the company constitutes merely an additional economic unit participating in the phenomena of the whole. It is thus apparent that the level of the turnover of a company depends on the market, and its profit will be reflected by its performance in it, which therefore' cannot be left to the intuition of its management or to the opinion more or loss fundamental of the corresponding organs. Something else is required, the various possibilities and marketing programmes must be strictly reasoned and justified; it must be shown that the criterion adopted is that which meets realities and for that there is no alternative other than to know the market in an objective way, particularly its volume, which limits the cause and effect of each phenomenon. To summarise, research must be carried out in its widest sense. This is the object of the research, and employs a number of techniques which tend to quantify the hidden phenomena of the market, with a view to obtaining a reasoned knowledge of them which may be used for the taking of decisions.
Osgoods holds that concepts, situated in space, can be defined by means of three dimensions - evaluation, potency and activity. He determines this geometrical construction by applying factor analysis to the results that he obtains with his fifty semantic differentials. The increasing use of computers has had the result that his method is at the moment undergoing a revival.
The objective of this article is to contribute to throw some more light on the following questions: 1. Are consumers able to discriminate among different brands of a product (in this particular case, beer) when the brands are not identified?; 2 . What is the influence of brand identification on the consumers evaluation of a brand?; 3. Why and how do brand images develop among consumers? In the following, first some selected relevant earlier studies will be briefly reviewed. Next, the results of a new experiment are presented. Finally, the results of the experiment are interpreted in the light of a conceptualisation of consumer decision processes.