The Impact of Product Placement and Nudging on British Airways' Brand Equity in Denmark, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Marketing

Download The Impact of Product Placement and Nudging on British Airways' Brand Equity in Denmark and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Marketing in PDF only on Docsity! Page 1 of 105 Strategic Branding of British Airways Measuring the effect product placement and nudging have on the level of brand equity in British Airways in Denmark Programme: Cand.merc. (Strategic Market Creation) Type of assignment: Master’s thesis Author: Pernille Smith Hansen Hand-in date: May 17th 2016 Supervisor: Ole Stenvinkel Nilsson Number of pages: 79 Number of characters: 167,077 (including spaces) C o p e n h a g e n B u s i n e s s S c h o o l 2 0 1 6 Page 2 of 105 (Declaration of authorship) Page 5 of 105 1. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine what effect the marketing initiatives product placement and nudging have on the level of brand equity in the British airline company British Airways in Denmark. In this paper brand equity is studied from a consumer-based brand perspective in order to assess the equity as perceived by the consumers. The brand equity measured in this paper is thus not determining any financial value of the company. The hypotheses are that both nudging and product placement will have a positive effect on brand equity in BA. The development of the hypotheses is reasoned in the existing theory on brand equity, nudging and product placement. The method conducted includes two elements. Firstly the level of brand equity of British Airways has been measured through an online self-completion questionnaire. Thereafter, by conducting two different quasi-experiments of non-equivalent control group design, the results from the effects of product placement and nudging become subject to statistical analysis. The results from the questionnaire serve as a point of reference to which the results from the experiments are to be measured. Some considerations on the methodological approach will be made, suggesting that some non-random errors might have affected the measurements. The results from the statistical analysis yielded no statistical significant effects neither of the product placement nor the nudging experiment. The hypotheses can, on the basis of the research conducted in this paper, not be accepted, and therefore we have not been able to establish any significant effect as a result of the marketing initiatives. It is believed that the research conducted in this paper is valuable knowledge to British Airways and some potential future actions for the company are discussed. The conclusion hereof is that some changes in the use of the marketing initiatives could potentially be able to increase the effectiveness of the initiatives. It is also discussed whether the lack of significance is caused by other factors in BA. Page 6 of 105 2. Introduction Over the last decades the understanding of a brand and the value it ads to a company has developed continually (Heding, Bjerre, & Knudtzen, 2009). Today a brand is considered to be an important strategic asset in a corporate portfolio. It is argued that if a company manages a brand effectively, it might gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace (Hatch & Schultz, 2008). A brand is thus not only considered a distinctive feature as its original meaning implies – it is a strategic asset and it must therefore be considered at a strategic level. Heding, Bjerre & Knudtzen argue that “a prerequisite for making the brand strategy work is that it is closely linked to the business strategy. This means that the brand and the brand strategy should not be perceived as something other than or as an addition to business strategy...” (Heding et al., 2009:15). One of the reasons a brand is considered a strategic asset is because it can endow a product with increased value – a value also known as brand equity. A consumer understands a brand’s equity as “…the value added to the functional product or service by associating it with the brand name” (Aaker, 1991). The brand equity will provide value to customers by enhancing their processing of information, their confidence in the purchase situation, and the user satisfaction (Aaker, 1991). Since the consumer is actively affecting brand equity, they play an important role in the management of a brand and its strategy. The initiatives companies can carry out to create and maintain brand equity are manifold and include for example advertising, retail presence, publicity, word of mouth, and product design (Aaker, 1996). A key point here is, that the outcomes of different initiatives can be affecting different aspects of the brand equity. Because of all the different marketing initiatives that can be used in branding, being a consumer today can be challenging. As a consumer you are constantly subject to a variety of marketing techniques trying to affect you in different directions. Some of the techniques used are discreet and subtle and might not even be noticed by the consumer, yet they might still be effective. Some of the more subtle marketing techniques are nudging and product placement. Both are seen as marketing initiatives that are meant to enhance customer value (Goldstein, Johnson, Herrmann, & Heitmann, 2008; Lehu, 2007). 2.1. Nudging The overall concept of nudging takes its stand in choice architecture and the assumption that there is no such thing as a neutral design. A nudge can be seen as ”any aspect of choice architecture Page 7 of 105 that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009:6). Nudging is thus an initiative trying to affect behavior without taking away alternative options and in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves. The goal of many nudges is to make life simpler, safer, or easier for people to navigate through (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009). Over the last years nudging has been accepted as a marketing initiative that can be used both in the private and public sector. From a marketing perspective companies should use nudging to simplify consumer decision-making, thereby making it easier to make decisions and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction (Goldstein et al., 2008). 2.2. Product Placement Product placement involves the integration of a product or brand into a movie or a TV show. The placement might be a logo, a brand name, a product or its packaging. Product placement is considered to be an alternative or unofficial form of advertising and therefore communicates to the audience in a different context than that of classical advertising (Lehu, 2007). Studies have shown that people tend not to notice product placement in movies or TV shows. So even though it is not meant to be subliminal communication, viewers do not necessarily consciously perceive the placements in spite of the fact they are perfectly visible (ibid). An audience often accepts the use of product placement because it adds to the realism of a movie. One of the reasons for using product placement is the assumption that it can replace classic advertisings in a world where commercial- breaks on TV are easy to avoid (Lehu, 2007) and in a time where online streaming is becoming widely used as a substitute for television (Ericsson ConsumerLab, 2015). To a certain extent product placement can create the same effects as classical advertising; provide information and/or try to convince customers to choose a specific brand and thus create confidence in the purchase situation (Bagwell, 2007). However, it is seen as even more relevant to use product placement to establish emotional relations. It is argued that product placement “through the show and entertainment dimension of its communication, […] should be seen as the opportunity to recreate an emotional link with a consumer…” (Lehu, 2007:238). Page 10 of 105 solely in Denmark. The payoff is too small.” (P. Rasmussen, Commercial Management, April 2016). Thus, all initiatives concerning commercial management across the Northern Countries such as Scandinavia, Baltics, Iceland, Russia, and Ukraine are operated jointly, and are driven by Peter Rasmussen. He has kindly provided information about the BA offices in Denmark in an interview. As BA does not distinguish Denmark from other European countries no direct marketing is made for the Danish market: ”All our marketing and handling of BA.com are actually centralized in London. […] So we don’t have any local marketing. It is global initiatives but with a great foothold in our home market in Europe. Secondarily in USA, but also India.” (P. Rasmussen, Commercial Management, April 2016). This also means that not all the marketing that is carried out from the head offices in London makes its way to Denmark. In that way the marketing in Denmark is restricted to whatever activities more or less randomly are used in the Danish market. As a result there is no explicit brand strategy, and in Denmark BA are not working specifically on the brand to create value: “The investment required to make people, who are traveling to London, or any other destination in the world where BA travels, think of BA, well, the costs will be enormous and that would never be relevant to us. We wouldn’t do that. In our home market, England, it is completely different. But not in Denmark, no.” (ibid). BA has two major target groups: B2B customers using the airlines for business trips and B2C customers flying leisure trips. At the office in Denmark, the main focus is to create corporate agreements making sure that companies make their employees travel with BA when they are going on business trips. Furthermore the office in Denmark handles PR and search optimization on the Danish search engines. 2.3.3. Challenges in the airline industry Today the airline industry is largely influenced by online traveling agencies. They sell tickets for airline companies by using search engines that handle all departures of different airlines. These external distributors uses a Global Distribution System (GDS) called Amadeus. When a customer buys a flight ticket through the GDS the airline has to pay a fee to the distributor. The greatest disadvantage of the GDS, apart from the costs of using it, is that no customer-insight is passed on to the airline company when a flight ticket is bought. In stead this insight stays in the GDS. This represents an important challenge to the airline companies, as they do not receive any insight or knowledge about the customers that are using the travel agencies. Not knowing who their Page 11 of 105 customers are makes it difficult to determine target groups and direct marketing more specifically towards customers. This is especially considered to be a challenge to the airline companies that sell a great share of their tickets through the online travel agencies. As a result of this market structure BA has not got the sufficient insight about their Danish customers to be able to define any specific target groups. 2.3.4. Nudging and product placement in BA When visiting their website www.BA.com you are immediately faced with the architecture of the purchasing process when buying a flight ticket. It shows that considerations have been made to ensure the user-friendliness, and techniques such as nudging are present, leading the customer through the purchase flow: “We have defined some archetypes: different customer segments with different needs. […] Then we classify the customer: what is it we believe that this customer will choose, and what do we believe we can sell to him. […] (We want to) sell him something that he would like to buy.” (P. Rasmussen, Commercial Management, April 2016). The specific use of nudging on BA.com will be further elaborated in section 6. In regard to product placement BA states that their brand includes planes, cabins, and their staff. BA argues that they will consider using product placement either if their products can be showcased in the film, if it includes interaction with British Airways’ staff, if there is a contact with an international audience, or if the project is intended for BA’s key markets. Furthermore they only wish to engage in product placement if the placement builds on their brand values (British Airways, 2016e). The specific use of product placement will also be further elaborated in section 6. 2.4. Research question Nudging and product placement are seen as two very different marketing initiatives that have some features in common; they are both discrete, and might not be noticed by the consumer. They are both talking to the subconscious mind and are trying to affect our choices in a discreet and subtle way. Neither nudging nor product placements are hidden nor a secret to the consumer, but are both directed towards the reflective behavioral system and the subconscious mind. Both nudging and product placement are seen and used as marketing initiatives that can enhance customer value. From a company perspective both nudging and product placement can therefore be considered useful when you are working with a brand. But as Heding, Bjerre & Knudtzen have Page 12 of 105 emphasized it is important not only to consider the usefulness of an initiative, but also to work with branding on a strategic level. Working with branding at a strategic level includes considering which initiatives should be used, and what effect they create, since the outcomes of different initiatives can be affecting different aspects of the value of a brand. A relevant question thus becomes how both of these initiatives can affect the customer value provided through brand equity. This has lead to the following research question: How can nudging and product placement respectively affect the level of brand equity in the airline company British Airways in Denmark? The overall aim of this paper is to examine the answer to this question. This is done in two steps: the first step is to establish the level of brand equity of British Airways today. In that way the measured brand equity can function as a point of reference. The second step is to expose a group of people to the two marketing techniques; nudging and product placement, and afterwards measure the brand equity of BA in these groups. In that way it will be possible to look into the specific effect that the initiatives have had on the brand equity. To fully understand how you can use nudging and product placement in branding it requires a deeper understanding of brand equity. So the first part of the paper will be looking into the theory of branding and brand equity to found a basis for measuring the brand equity of the case company. During this first part some key elements of measurement will be established. Furthermore the first part will be looking into the theory of nudging and product placement. The second part of the paper will focus on setting up the premises for conducting an actual experiment with the marketing initiatives specifically used in BA. This part of the paper will focus on how data is collected and the methodological considerations in this regard. The third part of the paper will focus on analyzing the results of the experiments. Here the data will be analyzed based on the different elements of brand equity. On the basis of the analysis the fourth part will be focusing on the results of the experiments and what conclusions can be made about how nudging and product placement affects brand equity. Furthermore some recommendations to further research will be made. Finally the usefulness of the research to BA will be discussed. The discussion will focus on how the findings can be used by BA to work strategically with their brand in Denmark in the future. Page 15 of 105 2.5.4. Product placement A definition of product placement is introduced in the book Branded entertainment: Product Placement and brand strategy in the entertainment business by Jean-Marc Lehu: “The expression ‘product placement’, or ‘brand placement’, essentially describes the location or, more accurately, the integration of a product or a brand into a film or televised series” (Lehu, 2007:1). Product placement is thus a matter of placing a product or a brand in one or more scenes of a film. There are multiple ways in which a brand can be placed in a movie: classic placement, corporate placement, evocative placement, and stealth placement. However they all have one potential disadvantage in common: the audience might not notice the placement. This paper will be looking deeper into the way BA has chosen to integrate their brand in a film and is thus limited to focus on one way of product placement design. Furthermore it will be focusing on examining product placement in terms of brand equity and thus other potential effects of product placement will not be considered. 2.6. Relevance This study is meant to cast some light on how a company can use nudging and product placement to create brand equity. It is believed that this knowledge will be useful to companies that whishes to work with branding on a strategic level. It is furthermore believed that this knowledge can help minimize uncertainty as to what effect an initiative can have on a brand. Furthermore the results of this paper are believed to be of relevance to BA and will provide knowledge on how to work with their brand in Denmark in the future. This section will look a little deeper into the relevance of this paper. The arguments presented here are also emphasizing the motivation for writing the paper. 2.6.1. Nudging Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduced nudging as a term in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness in 2008. It is thus considered a fairly new concept within the field of decision-making. Even though being a more recent term, nudging has already been widely acknowledged as an effective way of changing behavior e.g. within food consumption (Hanks, Just, Smith, & Wansink, 2012; Kallbekken & Saelen, 2013; C. Keller, Markert, & Bucher, 2011), organ donation (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003), and energy saving (Allcott & Kessler, 2015). In their book Richard Thaler and Cas Sunstein focus on nudging as a tool for improving choice Page 16 of 105 architecture in a way that helps people make more rational choices within savings, investments, mortgages, social security, prescription drugs, organ donation, saving the planet, and marriage. They do not consider the possible upsides of nudging seen from a marketing perspective but do rather argue, “If consumers have a less than fully rational belief, firms often have more incentive to cater to that belief than to eradicate it” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009:87). And even if that might be true in some cases, it might not always be beneficial for companies to base their business model on irrational consumers. This paper argues that companies too can benefit from using nudging in a way that creates a win-win-situation for both the consumer and the company. This study will be focusing on the outcome of using nudging as a marketing initiative and thereby contributing to the fields of marketing and nudging. Furthermore the paper will help expand the understanding and use of nudging that is still a field of limited contributions. Specifically in relation to nudging and brand equity both an EBSCO-database and CBS libsearch scan for the keywords “nudging” and “brand equity” combined, yields no results, indicating a lack of previous research on the subject. Furthermore a Google-search provides 44,800 results on the subjects combined as opposed to 3,940,000 and 7,020,000 hits separately. It is thus believed that the paper will help build a foundation for studying nudging from a marketing perspective. 2.6.2. Product placement Studies on product placement so far have focused on different areas of product placements including the attitudes toward product placements and consumer experiences (De Gregorio & Sung, 2010; Nelson, 2002; Reid & DeLorme, 1999), brand recognition (Bressoud, Lehu, & Russell, 2010; D'Astous & Chartier, 2000; Dens, De Pelsmacker, Wouters, & Purnawirawan, 2012; C. Russell, 2002), and brand attitudes (Cowley & Barron, 2008; Homer, 2009; Reijmersdal, 2009; C. A. Russell & Stern, 2006; Tiwsakul, Hackley, & Szmigin, 2005). 
However Jean-Marc Lehu (2007) argues that only a limited amount of research about the impact on brand equity has been made. To contribute to the field of knowledge, this paper will try to include aspects of brand equity to evaluate the overall effect of product placement. From this point of view the paper will be contributing to evaluating the specific effects that can be expected when using product placement as a marketing tool. A search on the EBSCO-databases with the keywords “product placement” and “brand equity” suggests that little work has been done on this exact topic. If it is required that both product Page 17 of 105 placement and brand equity is part of the title the database-search gives no results. A wider search for the same keywords reveals 10 results, whereof 5 are peer-reviewed articles (EBSCO Host, 2016). The same searches on CBS’ Libsearch database result in 8 and 1 hits respectively (Copenhagen Business School, 2016). A simple Google-search gives approximately 114,000 results. In comparison, a search for product placement and brand equity separately gives 13,400,000 and 7,020,000 hits respectively, indicating a lower field of knowledge on the subjects combined. It is thus considered relevant to bring these two subjects together in the same study to explore and uncover possible unknown knowledge on the field. 2.6.3. British Airways A part from contributing to the general knowledge on the field this paper is considered relevant for BA. The results will both provide insight into their current level of brand equity in Denmark and it will provide an insight into how valuable the brand BA is considered to be. This knowledge can provide useful insight to how to address the Danish customers and how to work strategically with their brand in the future. As it have been established that BA does not plan specific marketing initiatives for the Danish market it is useful for them to know how the initiatives that still makes their way to Denmark works. This knowledge can help them estimate the value of such initiatives compared to the effect they have. If it is found that nudging and product placement have a positive effect on the level of brand equity it is considered positive and a recommendation would be to invest further in these types of initiatives. If, however, there is not found any effect of the initiatives, a recommendation would be to consider using other marketing initiatives. Knowing the effect of the subtle and discrete marketing initiatives that nudging and product placement are, it might affect the use of these initiatives in the future. For BA it is considered to be valuable knowing how different marketing initiatives work, and how they can use them to work strategically with their brand outside of their home country. Thus, this paper will provide some insight into how these marketing initiatives in the future can be used to work on their brand equity. Page 20 of 105 not. Because people are helped in the process, brand recognition is considered a minimal level of brand awareness, but is particularly important if the customer chooses the brand at the point of purchase. Brand recall is based upon asking a person to name different brands in a product class, also called unaided recall. Unaided recall is more difficult since no help is provided and thus is associated with a stronger brand position. Typically the first-named brand in an unaided recall has achieved top-of-mind awareness. The only position, which is more favorable than that, is if the brand is the only one recalled for a higher part of respondents (Aaker, 1991). The brand awareness can be divided into levels ranging from total unawareness to top of mind awareness. Brand awareness is the foundation on which other brand building initiatives can be built. Therefore you must first create awareness about your brand before communicating any brand attributes. Brand awareness cannot by it self create sales. However by creating awareness about a brand you provide a sense of familiarity. To a consumer brand recognition can affect how much they like the product and thus how often they decide to buy it. Simply exposing customers to a brand can create brand recognition. But in order to create brand recall a company should provide customers with an in-depth learning experience or many repetitions (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2007). In some cases brand awareness might not be sufficient to a customer to make a purchase decision. In some buying situations customers are motivated to go beyond the brand and evaluate the attributes of a product. In these cases familiarity with a brand might not be of decisive importance. It is thus important to look into how brand recall and brand recognition affects the customer’s purchase decisions in the specific industry and with a specific product (Aaker, 1991). 3.2.2. Perceived quality Perceived quality is an overall feeling about a brand and can be defined as “the customer’s perception of the overall quality or superiority of a product or service with respect to its intended purpose, relative to alternatives” (Aaker, 1991:85). Perceived quality cannot necessarily be determined in an objective way, but is defined relatively and are based on customer needs. This will affect the buying decision, as customers tend to favor a brand of higher perceived quality. It does not mean that people will always favor a brand with the absolute highest quality. It may also refer to a best in class. This indicates that people tend to evaluate quality relatively to the price and favor the one that has the highest perceived quality compared to the price (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2007). In this way the price can also work as an indicator for quality because customers expect quality to increase with the price. A high price thus indicates high quality (Aaker, 1991). This is an Page 21 of 105 important point since potential customers might assume that a brand they consider being of high quality is also expensive. In the service industry it can be difficult for a customer to evaluate the most important attributes of the service. In these situations consumers will look for other dimensions that are easily evaluated which they will use as a substitute. In the airline industry some things, such as the flight safety can be hard to evaluate. So instead people might use employees’ appearance and attitude as a means of measuring it (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2007). According to Wong & Gilbert (2003) there are some factors that can affect perceived quality in the airline industry. These factors can be found in table 3.1. The importance of the factors can vary based on nationality and the purpose of the travel. Assurance Safety records Employees’ capability Reliability On-time departure/arrival Consistent service Responsiveness Efficient service Prompt handling of requests/complaints Employees Employees’ appearance Employees’ attitudes Facilities Check-in/baggage handling service In-flight facilities Waiting lounge Customization Individual attention Anticipation of your travel needs Table 3.1. Factors that affect perceived quality They conclude that assurance is the number one priority for passengers followed by reliability and responsiveness. However, changes in law regulations made in 2006 have affected the industry, and an important parameter to consider is that all airlines flying in Europe has to meet certain safety standards. Companies that do not meet these standards are either subject to a flight ban or can only fly under special conditions within Europe (Dit Europa, 2006, 2015). These changes might have had an effect on what affects the perceived quality today and the assurance might not be considered as important as earlier to indicate quality. Page 22 of 105 3.2.3. Brand associations Brand associations are “anything ‘linked’ in memory to a brand” (Aaker, 1991:109). A brand image is the set of associations that all are linked to a brand. Associations are providing customers with a relation to the brand and something they can use to recall the brand. Neither associations nor images may necessarily reflect objective reality but are held by the consumer. A brand that is well positioned will have an attractive position supported by strong associations. The associations can be directly translated into reasons to by or not to by a brand. When examining brand associations it can be done either by a qualitative or quantitative approach. The qualitative approach includes projective methods where focus is on the use experience, the decision process, the brand user, or other perspectives the like. The quantitative method includes a more direct approach where brand associations are scaled upon a set of dimensions (Aaker, 1991). 3.2.4. Brand loyalty Brand loyalty is a measure of the attachment that a customer has to a brand. It reflects how likely it is that a customer will switch to another brand if something changes. There are several levels of brand loyalty, which are presented in figure 3.2. The brand loyalty is considered the core of a brand’s equity. If customers are indifferent to the brand, but buy with respect to other features, there is likely very little brand equity. Brand loyalty can be built if there are switching costs associated with switching brands. In the airline industry switching-costs can be created with bonus points that are received when traveling with an airline. The points can typically be used as payment for flights, upgrades or other travel rewards. A customer that has collected a large amount of bonus points will be less reluctant to change airline since they then will not get any use of Figure 3.2. Levels of brand loyalty (Aaker, 1991:40) Page 25 of 105 3.4. Product placement Product placement is divided into four categories: classic placement, corporate placement, evocative placement, and stealth placement. The classic product placement was the first technique used in cinemas more than a hundred years ago. It is simply a matter of letting a product appear in the camera view during the film, and practically anything is possible in this form of placement. The classic product placement is easily put in place, and the cost is relatively low. However the downside is, that it might easily go by unnoticed by the consumer, especially if there is a large number of different placements in the film (Lehu, 2007). Corporate placement prioritizes to show the brand instead of the product and a brand name or logo will appear in the film. The upside of corporate placement is that it benefits all the products and services sold by the brand. Furthermore it is more durable and a brand can expect a longer on screen career than a specific product since the lifespan of a brand usually is longer than that of a product. The downside, however, is that to be noticed it usually requires that the audience knows the brand before seeing the film. If they don’t, it might go completely noticed (Lehu, 2007). The majority of studies on product placement confirm an overall tolerance among audiences for the placement of products or brands. It seems that there is even an appreciation of the approach in certain cases, where the integration is particularly successful (Lehu, 2007). One study has showed that the number of product placements has an effect on the overall performance of the movie. Results indicated that 44 placements or less would result in a positive relationship with movie performance (Song, Meyer, & Ha, 2015). 3.5. Development of hypotheses Based on the existing theory some expectations about the results of the research are seen as natural outcomes. The following section will present the hypotheses that have been drawn up as a result of the research question and the presented theory. These hypotheses will make the basis for analyzing the effect of the marketing initiatives. Theory on brand equity suggests that creating either brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand associations, or perceived quality will affect the overall level of brand equity. An important point is, that one initiative will not be able to affect one aspect of brand equity negatively and another Page 26 of 105 aspect positively. Therefore it is expected that the marketing initiatives can affect the brand equity either positively, negatively or not have any significant impact at all. 3.5.1. Hypotheses concerning nudging Nudging is considered a subtle way of affecting the consumer decision-making process, and often affects the consumer’s decisions without them even noticing it. A key element of nudging is that customers should be free to act as they wish without nudging imposing an obstacle. The effectiveness if nudging is thus limited to customers accepting the nudge. In this relation, it is expected that nudging will not have a significant effect on brand equity as customers are free to avoid any intended effect that nudging suggests. The null-hypothesis in regard to nudging is therefore the following: h0A: Nudging has no effect on brand equity. The underlying idea of defaults is to suggest a recommended action and a setup that the customer will get if they do nothing to change it. And because it has been argued that default settings are widely accepted, it is believed that most customers will accept the nudge. The default is seen as a help to customers, as it is easing the decision-making process and is intended to increase customer satisfaction. Therefore, if nudging has any effect on brand equity it is believed that it will be positive: h1A: Nudging has a positive effect on brand equity. The nudging considered in this paper only includes the nudging that takes place on BA’s website. Therefore it would make no sense to examine the part of brand equity that is concerned with brand awareness, since the participants already have been informed about the specific brand in question. As nudging is meant to affect and help the customer in the decision-making process it is argued that the nudging found on BA.com will primarily be able to affect the aspects of brand equity that are concerned with the purchase decision. The aspects of brand equity that are linked to the decision-making process are the perceived quality of a brand and the brand associations. On the contrary brand loyalty is concerned with the level of loyalty to a specific brand and the feelings attached to the purchase. The nudging used in the purchasing process is furthermore not expected to have any affect on loyal of customers, as they already know the products and know what they want. It is therefore expected that nudging cannot affect the brand loyalty: Page 27 of 105 h2A: nudging will have no effect on brand loyalty. Perceived quality is one of the elements of brand equity that is believed to create a reason to buy. It is thus argued to be one of the elements of brand equity that can be affected by nudging. When people visit BA.com they are exposed to nudges that can ultimately be confirming their decision to buy their flight ticket from BA. The expectation hereto is that nudging can affect the perceived quality in a positive way as nudges might confirm the individuals that they are currently making the right decision: h3A: nudging will have a positive effect on perceived quality. Furthermore, since brand associations are considered to have a direct influence on the purchase decision it would be interesting to look into how nudging will affect the associations. If the nudges on BA.com works according to BA’s brand strategy customers will be able to recognize and even create the desired associations by visiting their website, although it might be done subconsciously. The expectation one this subject is that: h4A: nudging will have a positive effect on brand associations. 3.5.2. Hypotheses concerning product placement It has been emphasized that product placement easily can go unnoticed. This is particularly true if the audience is not familiar with the brand before watching the movie. It is therefore to be expected that product placement might not have a significant impact on brand equity. Thus, the null- hypothesis in relation to product placement is the following: h0B: Product placement has no effect on brand equity. If, however, product placement should have a significant impact on brand equity it is believed the effect will be positive. This is found as product placement is experienced as a positive attribute of a film that adds to its realism. Furthermore it has been argued that product placements have a positive effect on the performance of the film, and it is expected that the positive effect could go both ways. From this point of view the alternative hypothesis is: h1B: Product placement has a positive effect on brand equity. Page 30 of 105 Nominal scale Ordinal scale Ratio/Interval scale Personal factual questions Question 1,3,9, and 12 Question 2,4,5,8 and 10 Questions about knowledge Question 6 and 7 Questions about normative standards and values Question 11 Question 22 Questions about attitudes Question 13 - 21 Question 23 – 46 Table 4.1. Types of questions in the questionnaire 4.1.1. Design The questionnaire was designed in Enalyzer survey solution, an online web application allowing an unlimited number of questions. Furthermore Enalyzer made it possible to condition the questions ensuring that respondents only answer questions relevant to them. As an example question 10 is conditioned to show only to respondents who already indicated that they have flown with any of the mentioned airlines. Enalyzer also offer a direct import of data to SPSS, which is a statistical program used to process the data from the questionnaire. 4.1.2. Piloting and pre-testing Before publishing the survey a simple pre-testing was made, resulting in minor linguistic corrections to ensure that all questions were understood. Specifically it was found important to clarify the differences between the possible answers in question 12 (which was done by adding examples), and whether a round-trip counts as one or two travels (in question 8 and 10). Furthermore question 14 to 21 was initially pilot-tested, as an open question to find which factors should be formed into a question. The overview of categorization of the provided answers can be found in appendix B. 4.1.3. Sampling The population of this sample is people in the Danish population at age 13 or above. In 2016 the total of the population is thus 4,879,963 people (Danmarks Statistik, 2016). The sampling frame should be representative of this population. The sampling of responses was done through an online non-probability snowball sampling (Bryman, 2012). Initial contact was made through Facebook and Instagram in a personal network, inviting people to answer the questionnaire. The initial contact of this group established contact Page 31 of 105 with others by reposting (13 reposts) and liking (22 likes) the link directing to the survey. Depending on different private settings on Facebook a minimum of 2,500 people have been invited to answer the questionnaire. The sampling was done over a period of 3 weeks and a total of 292 people opened the questionnaire. Of the 292 openings 193 people finished the questionnaire, resulting in a total finishing level of 66%. The main issue about this sampling method is that it is very unlikely that the sample will be representative of the population. A point of concern is the fact that the data is collected online, and is thus excluding a part of the population who do not use social media. It is also important to stress that the data collected through snowball sampling is not considered to draw a random sample (Bryman, 2012). This means that the people who answered the questionnaire were more likely to be invited to answer, than those who did not. Over all this affects to which degree the findings can be generalized to the population, as defined above. To furthermore assess the degree of sampling error some considerations are made about the demographics of the sample compared to the population. These can be found in figure 4.1 to 4.3. Firstly it is clear that a larger share of women answered the questionnaire than did men. In the population there is an approximately 50- 50 distribution of men and women. In the sample however, there are 75.5% women and 24.5% men. In order to test the represent- tativeness of the sample a chi-square test compared the distribution of genders. The expected count of men and women is 153 and 156 respectively. But as the chi-square is 64.72 with a p-level of ,000 the count of men (82) is significantly different from the expected, and thus the population. This distribution of gender is therefore not considered to be representative of the population. This suggests an important sampling error that will affect the generalizability of the findings. When it comes to the distribution of age in the sample, it seems that especially the category of respondents in the ages of 55 years or older are underrepresented as only 9.06% of the sample makes up people in this age group compared to 38.93% in the population. Furthermore there is an overweight of respondents in the age group of 25-34 years since only 12.28% of the population is 75,50% 24,50% 50,28% 49,72% Women Men Figure 4.1. Distribution of gender Population Sample Page 32 of 105 in this age group compared to 45.95% in the sample. This is confirmed by a chi-square test where the sample and the population are compared. The chi-square is 382.79, with a p-level at .000. The very high chi-square level tells us, that there are found great differences in the expected counts and the actual counts in the different age groups. With respect to age, the respondents in questionnaire are not representative of the population. 1The last point of comparison is the income level of the population compared to the sample. Here it seems that the sample contains a large share of respondents in the DKK 400,000+ category, suggesting that the mean income level of the respondents are higher than that of the population. The chi-square test for the distri- bution of income gives a chi-square level of 642.56, which is even higher than the one measured for the distribution of age. That means that the sample is not representing the population at a significant level when it comes to the distribution of income level either. Apart from the differences that have been highlighted henceforth, it is believed that there could be more differences between the population and the sample that is not accounted for. These differences are not insignificant; they are on the contrary very important for evaluating the degree 1 Note that all graphs in this paper are using the Danish comma. 8,47% 8,87% 12,28% 14,64% 16,80% 38,93% 1,62% 13,59% 45,95% 15,86% 13,92% 9,06% 13-18 years 19-24 years 25-34 years 35-44 years 45-54 years 55- Figure 4.2. Distribution of age Population Sample 62,94% 33,87% 3,20% 42,40% 27,92% 29,68% 0 - 199.999 200.000 - 399.999 400.000 + Figure 4.3. Distribution of income1 Population Sample Page 35 of 105 After having participated in the experiment the participants were asked to answer the same self- completion online questionnaire as was used to measure the general level of BA’s brand equity. The only changes made, was that these participants were not asked about the brand awareness as this have already been affected and the answers to these questions would not provide useful information about the participant’s brand awareness. Because the participants have answered the same questions the answers can be compared to the answers from the respondents who only answered the questionnaire. Respondents were asked to complete the experiment at home. This has both positive and negative effects. A considered upside of this setup is that it increases the realism of the experiment. As people would usually engage in buying a flight ticket at home – and not in an unfamiliar setting accompanied by strangers – this scenario is the most realistic and will thus provide the most realistic measurements. However, this also leaves little control over which variables are affecting the responses to the questionnaire. Participants might not pay as much attention to the experiment as they might have done if they met with a group of people all focused on participating in the experiment. Furthermore a critical note must be made to this setup as it is hard excluding participants to be affected by other factors, such as the design of the website, the price and offerings of their flight tickets, and the written communication. Thus, the defaults that makes up the purchase flow is not the only variable affecting participants. Another downside of this setup is, that the limited strength of the manipulation. According to Cozby “a strong manipulation is particularly important in the early stages of research, when the researcher is most interested in demonstrating that a relationship does, in fact, exists.” (Cozby, 2009:168). This is believed to affect the statistical strength of the experiment and the conclusions that can be made from the experiment. Lastly, with this design we cannot eliminate the possibility of people only finishing the last part of the experiment – namely the questionnaire. If this is the case there will be no difference between the participants in this experiment and the respondents from the questionnaire, as they have not been exposed to the independent variable. 4.2.2. Experiment B Experiment B focuses on product placement. In this experiment people were invited to see a movie in the cinema. The movie contained product placement of BA, and thus by seeing the movie the Page 36 of 105 participants were automatically ‘exposed’ to the experiment. Nordisk Film A/S and Nordisk Film Biografer A/S generously provided a cinema along with supplies and popcorn. In this way experiment B is considered to be an event manipulations because it was “necessary to […] stimulate a situation that occurs in the real world” (Cozby, 2009:167). As a result the strength of the manipulation in experiment B is considered stronger than experiment A. By inviting the participants into a cinema to see the movie would stimulate the real experience. But as participants had no control over which movie to see, they would all be affected by the dependent variable. The participants arrived at the cinema of Nordisk Film in Valby and were offered soft drinks and popcorn to the movie. The participants were not asked to look for anything specific in the movie. Additionally, they weren’t introduced to the survey before the movie was over, in order to ensure that participants were not affected by the content of the questions or started answering the questionnaire before having been exposed to the independent variable. When the movie was done the survey was handed out in physical print as a self-completion questionnaire. Afterwards the answers were coded in a manner similar to the other responses collected from the survey and experiment A. No introduction was made to the questions in the questionnaire, other than participants were advised to answer the questions alone and in sequential order. When the participants had filled out the questionnaire they were introduced to the underlying purpose of the experiment. The decision to have the participants fill out the questionnaire by hand was to ensure that all participants answered the questionnaire. If they were asked to answer it online they might not have had the possibility to answer it right away. That could have caused uncertainties in the answers as participants could have been exposed to additional marketing on their way home. Furthermore to ensure that participants didn’t talk about the questions or decided to answer the questionnaire together, and thereby possibly affecting the brand awareness, it was decided to use physical prints of the questionnaire. But this is also considered to have some downsides. The greatest downside is considered to be the time used to manually type in the answers from all participants. As this is manual labor, some typing errors might have occurred, thus affecting the measurements made in the experiment. Because the sample size of the experiment is considered fairly small errors in the coding can have significant impact on the results. Page 37 of 105 4.2.3. Selecting participants All participants in both experiments were found through an online non-random snowball sampling, just like the respondents in the questionnaire. Facebook-events invited people to participate in the two experiments. Experiment A contained the instructions, inviting people to participate simply by following the instructions. Experiment B included an invitation to come see a movie in the cinema. The invitation did not say which movie would be shown, to ensure diversity in the participants. A copy of the invitation can be found in appendix D. Table 4.2 provides an overview of the total number of participants in the experiments. This shows, that a fairly small number of people participated. As the total number of participants in both experiments is less than the desired number, 117, the size of the experiments has consequences to which degree we will find any significant results. However, all statistical analysis will be conducted anyway. Event 1 Event 2 Total Experiment A 18 20 40 Experiment B 19 30 49 Table 4.2. Participants in the experiments In a classic experimental design participants are randomly assigned to the independent variable conditions. All other variables than the independent variable are held constant and in that way it is possible to measure the effect on the dependent variable (Bryman, 2012). However, as the participants in the conducted experiments are not randomly selected it is not considered to be a true experimental design. Instead they are considered quasi-experimental designs, “that is, studies that have certain characteristics of experimental designs but that do not fulfill all the internal validity requirements.” (Bryman, 2012:56). The main reason that the experiments are not considered true experiments is because of the selection differences of participants: “The problem of selection differences arises because [participants] who choose to participate may differ in some important way from those who do not.” (Cozby, 2009:212). When the participants in the experiments volunteer to participate they are not considered equivalent, and the selection differences become a confounding variable. The experiments are thus considered to be nonequivalent control group designs, which are defined as designs that employ a separate control group, but the participants in the two conditions are not equivalent (Cozby, 2009). Furthermore no pretests have been made, which means that the groups have only been measured after being (or not being) exposed to the independent variables. Therefore the results cannot be corrected for any test-effects that are caused simply by participating in the experiment. To be able Page 40 of 105 4.4. Validity Validity is a criterion concerned with the integrity of conclusions, which are generated from research. In relation to this paper the validity is about whether the questions in the questionnaire actually measures the level of brand equity of BA and whether the experiments actually measure the effects of nudging and product placement. The main types of validity are measurement validity, internal validity, and external validity. Measurement validity is a question of whether the measure that is employed actually measures the construct, which it is intended to measure. Internal validity relates to the issues of causality and whether a conclusion that includes a causal relationship is valid (Bryman, 2012). Both validity measures will be discussed in this section. The external validity is concerned with the possibility of generalizing results beyond the specific research and will be discussed in section 4.5. 4.4.1. The questionnaire The measurement validity of the questionnaire is overall believed to be at a reasonable level. All questions are drawn up based on theory about brand equity and measurements suggested by the theory have been applied. It is thus believed that the questions asked are good indicators of the level of brand equity in BA. The considerations made in regard to the questions are further presented in section 6. One of the factors that are affecting the measurement validity is the fact that some of the measurements are employed as a result of BA’s own branding intentions. The measures of brand associations are based on BA’s own brand values as presented earlier. The measures of the drawn up brand values are used to assess to what extent respondents hold these brand associations. It is thus assumed that the brand values will be a good measure for the brand associations but in reality respondents might have other brand associations linked to the brand, that are not used in the evaluation of the brand associations. Secondly, some random errors are expected to affect the results. An example could be the aided recall test where respondents are asked if they know any of the listed airline companies. It is not uncommon that people perceive a questionnaire as some kind of test of their abilities and knowledge (Cozby, 2009). They might therefore state that they know more airlines than they actually know. This affects the level of brand awareness in a way that is not valid. Page 41 of 105 4.4.2. The experiments The experiments are lacking internal validity as it must be questioned whether the experimental manipulation actually worked. This is especially the case in relation to experiment A. The assumption is that the nudging used on the website will cause the level of brand equity to change. But, it must be argued that we cannot be sure that it is actually the nudging that caused the changes as there are other variables present on the website that could affect the participants. Examples of other variables are the design of the website and the text and written instructions in the purchase flow. Since both marketing initiatives are discrete and might not be noticed by the participants it is argued to have been better to increase the strength of the manipulations, to ensure that this are in fact the variables that participants are being influenced by when answering the questionnaire. By doing that it is believed that the level of validity would increase 4.5. Limits to generalization All the choices that have been made in relation to the methods of data collection have had an impact on the possibility to generalize the findings. Firstly, the sample is not considered to be representative of the population. The sampling errors presented in section 4.1.3 have caused the research to be affected by non-random errors. It is not considered statistically possible to generalize the findings to the Danish population at age 13 or above. The sample is representative of a different population and thus, when analyzing the results the paper will generalize findings and refer to a population that is essentially unknown. Secondly, the validity of experiment A is not considered high. As participants can be affected by more than nudging when visiting BA.com it is not considered an optimal manipulation. Thus, generalizing the findings of nudging might be to falsely conclude that the results are only a product of nudging. We might also be measuring the effect of other variables, such as website design and communication on the website. Thirdly, the research that has been conducted is very specific as it includes BA as a specific case. This affects the ability to generalize the findings across industries and different designs and uses of the marketing initiatives. Since this paper is only looking into how nudging and product placement specifically has been used by BA it is not obviously transferred into knowledge about Page 42 of 105 how these initiatives will affect other brands and other industries and it would thus be misleading to conclude anything about some general tendencies. When taking all of the limitations into account the appropriateness of generalizing the findings beyond the scope of its research context must be considered questionable. 5. Theory of science The theory of science that is applied in this paper is argued to be of critical rationalistic nature. Critical rationalism argues that “we can never determine a definitive truth, and because of that, only statements that can be falsified through empirical research can be considered scientific.” (Egholm, 2014:81) The purpose of this paper is not to definitively conclude a truth about marketing initiatives effect on brand equity. But based in the existing theory on the subject the purpose is to test whether the null-hypothesis about nudging and product placement not having any effect on brand equity can be rejected. In that way the results from the research will provide further details and insight into the effectives of the marketing initiatives. Based on the knowledge that is produced from this paper it is desired to be able to falsify the assumption that marketing initiatives such as nudging and product placement have no effect on brand equity. The applied theory of science is thus an a priori development of hypothesis that is to be falsified through empirical observations. As a result of the critical rationalistic theory of science the paper is founded in the natural sciences and it is believed that the scientific character is universal. A quantitative method is applied as a tool to examine the relationship between marketing initiatives and a company’s brand equity. The approach is to test the hypotheses that have been presented earlier by conducting some experiments and evaluating the results by applying statistical measurements. As the hypotheses have been formulated with their offset in existing literature and the theory on the subjects, the approach is deductive. The reason for applying the methods of critical rationalism as opposed to positivism is because of the challenges with verifying the hypothesis that has been made. When the scientific method is to verify scientific statements you will accept them as true knowledge. When based in verification you do not consider the possibility of a situation or experience that will reject previous accepted truths. If the research conducted in this paper should find a causal relationship between marketing Page 45 of 105 To what extent do you agree with the following statement? 13 "I only buy flight tickets from airline companies I know" To what extent do the following have an impact on your decision to buy a flight ticket? 14 "That the ticket is cheap" 15 "That food and drinks are served on board" 16 "That I know the airline company" 17 "That the ticket includes luggage" 18 "That I can choose my own seat on the plain" 19 "That I can buy flight ticket and hotel at the same time" 20 "That I can fly directly to my destination" 21 "Other" Please prioritize what you attach most importance to when traveling by plain 22 "Assurance" 23 "Flight details (number of flight changes, time of departure)" 24 "Reliability (That the plain arrives on time)" 25 "Employees (employees’ appearance and attitude)" 26 "Facilities (check-in/baggage handling service, in-flight facilities)" 27 "Customization (individual attention, anticipation of your travel needs)" 28 "That I know the airline company" To what extent do you agree with the following statements? 29 "British Airways offer an attractive range of travels" 30 "British Airways has good check-in and luggage service" 31 "British Airways has good facilities on board" 32 "British Airways is the essence of British culture" 33 "British Airways is a sophisticated airline company" 34 "British Airways is a high-quality airline company" 35 "British Airways is an airline company with a keen eye for detail" 36 "I like the appearance of British Airway's staff" 37 "The ticket prices at British Airways are low" 38 "British Airways provides a thoughtful service" 39 "British Airways takes care of the individual needs of travelers" 40 "The staff at British Airways are kind" 41 "British Airways provides a good service" 42 "British Airways has many years of flying experience" 43 "British Airways is an innovative airline company" 44 "British Airways is a reliable airline company" 45 "The staff at British airways are professionals within their field" 46 "It is safe traveling with British Airways" Table 6.1. Questions in the questionnaire Page 46 of 105 6.1.1. Demographic questions Question 1 to 5 is demographic questions concerning the gender, age, job-status, income level, and zip code of the respondents. These questions have already been used to evaluate the sample compared to the defined population in section 4. 6.1.2. Brand Awareness It has been argued that there are two different ways of measuring brand awareness; aided recall and unaided recall. Both kinds will be tested in the questionnaire. Brand recall is the unaided recall, and in the questionnaire the respondents are asked to name all the airline companies they can remember (question 6). It is believed that if BA is mentioned in the unaided recall they have a strong brand position. This will further clarify whether BA has top-of-mind brand awareness. This question will be asked before mentioning any airline companies, to make sure that the respondents have not been affected by any of the other questions. Question 7 is the aided recall test. A list of airlines will be presented and the respondents will be asked to mark the airline companies they know based on the list. Since there are more than 800 airline companies in the world (Karskov, 2014) some de-selections had to be made, since including so many airlines to a list, would make it hard for respondents to overcome the question and reply correctly. To make it more comprehensive for respondents ten airlines have been chosen. The ten airlines are the largest airlines in Europe by total scheduled and chartered passengers in 2015 (Wikipedia, 2015). They can all be found in table 6.1. All names have been presented with their brand name to ensure that respondents are not confused. Originally British Airways appears on the list of the world’s largest airlines as part of International Airlines Group, but in the paper it is the only brand represented from the group. Including other airlines in the measurements will further make it possible to compare BA’s level of brand awareness relative to some of the largest competitors. As part of brand awareness an important questions is to which degree recognition of a brand plays an active role in the decision-making process when buying a flight ticket. To be able to establish the importance of brand awareness, respondents are asked to evaluate whether or not they would buy a flight ticket from an airline company they don’t know (question 11 and 13). Page 47 of 105 6.1.3. Perceived quality It has been established that assurance, reliability, and responsiveness are important criteria affecting the perceived quality of an airline. However it is also emphasized that these factors can vary or might have changed over the last years caused by different developments in the industry. Therefore respondents are firstly asked to rank the importance of eight different factors in question 22 - 28. In question 29 - 46 respondents are asked to evaluate BA on all the different factors based on their current perception of the company. Some of will be used to assess the level of current perceived quality of BA on the factors, based on the results from question 22 - 28. 6.1.4. Brand associations As mentioned earlier there are different ways of measuring brand associations. As this is a quantitative study we will be measuring brand associations by scaling the brand upon a set of dimensions. These dimensions need to be limited to attributes and benefits of the brand or profiles of the user of the brand (Aaker, 1991). The dimensions that are used are the brand values as BA presents them. By using their own band values we will be able to measure how successfully the values have been implemented. As mentioned earlier BA has three brand values; British Style, Thoughtful Service, and Flying Know-how. These brand values contain some key words, as shown in table 2.1. It is expected that BA would like the three brand values to be BA’s brand image among consumers. Question 32, 33, and 34 concerns British Style and the respondents are asked to evaluate to what extent they associate BA with a British Style on different measurement parameters. Question 38 – 41 concerns Thoughtful Service and question 42, 43, and 45 concerns the Flying Know-how. 6.1.5. Brand Loyalty When it comes to brand loyalty it is firstly important to know to what extent customers buy flight tickets with respect to brand, or whether other features are more important. Question 28 concerns the degree to which customers considers the brand when buying a flight ticket. Question 28 will establish to what extent customers are willing to consider different airlines when buying a flight ticket and to what degree they are loyal to a single brand. Page 50 of 105 The second time BA is shown is in the airport. First, a screen is showing departure flights. All departures seem to be with BA, showing some of the different destinations that BA fly to. Additionally the logo is in the top of the screen. After that a final boarding call is made for passengers; “Attention passengers. This is the final boarding call for British Airways flight 422 for Amsterdam”. As the main character goes through security the BA logo is in the background. The last time BA is shown in the movie is at 2:05:00, where the main character takes out a flight ticket and looks at it shortly. The flight ticket includes the BA logo. All placements have thus included the logo and thereby also the brand name. Picture 6.2. The Holiday Page 51 of 105 7. Analysis This section will be analyzing the answers from the questionnaire and the two experiments. The findings from the questionnaire will be used as the frame of reference to which the results from the experiments will be compared. All elements of brand equity will be examined to evaluate the hypotheses and whether they can be falsified or not. 7.1. Brand awareness As stated earlier the questions 6, 7, 11 and 13 in the questionnaire concern brand awareness. This section will thus be looking into the brand awareness level based on those questions. According to Laurent, Kapferer, and Roussel (1995), the relationship between brand recognition and brand recall is curvilinear. That means that the brand recall increases as brand recognition increases. This relationship assumes that, when there is no brand recognition present, there cannot be any brand recall either. Furthermore it is assumed that if the level of brand recall is 100% the level of brand recognition will be 100%. Graph 7.1 is an illustration of the relationship as it has been measured in the airline industry. SAS Ryanair Norwegian Lufthansa British Airways easyJet Air France Turkish Airlines Air Berlin Aeroflot y = 0,0208e3,3417x R² = 0,70343 0,0% 10,0% 20,0% 30,0% 40,0% 50,0% 60,0% 70,0% 80,0% 35,0% 45,0% 55,0% 65,0% 75,0% 85,0% 95,0% B ra nd re ca ll Brand recognition Graph 7.1. The relationship between brand recognition and brand recall Page 52 of 105 7.1.1. Aided recall Table 7.1 shows a distribution of the answers in the aided recall test from the questionnaire and similarly table 7.2 shows the distribution of the answers from experiment B – product placement. The people that recognize BA is the respondents who answered yes when asked if they know BA. Distribution 95% Confidence Interval for Mean Frequency Percent Lower bound Upper bound Recognize BA 200 93% 89.6% 96.5% Don’t recognize BA 15 7% Total 215 100% Table 7.1. Frequencies in aided recall test (questionnaire) The measured level of brand recognition in the questionnaire is 93%. The confidence interval shows a brand recognition level of 89.6% to 96.5% in the population given a confidence level of 95%. This indicates that people in general is aware that BA is a part of the airline industry and that they have achieved a high level of brand recognition. The measured level of brand recognition is thus considered positive for BA. But a closer look at the brand awareness in the industry it must be noted, that this seems to be a general tendency. BA is not the brand with the highest brand recognition among its competitors – it is actually the 5th most recognized, outperformed by SAS, Ryan Air, Norwegian and Lufthansa, as can be seen in figure 7.1. It has previously been established that a positive relationship is expected between experiment B and the level of brand recognition, as the hypothesis is that product placement has a positive effect on brand awareness. It is thus expected that a higher share of the participants would recognize 100,0% 99,5% 97,7% 96,3% 93,0% 90,7% 81,9% 68,8% 62,8% 44,2% SAS Ryanair Norwegian Lufthansa British Airways easyJet Air France Turkish Airlines Air Berlin Aeroflot Figure 7.1. Brand recognition in the questionnaire Page 55 of 105 When looking at the brand recall, we see that 63.9% of respondents who previously have traveled with BA recalled the brand. On the contrary only 29.5% of respondents who haven’t traveled with BA recalled the brand in the unaided recall. It thus seems that past interaction with the brand might be affecting whether you recall the brand or not. A chi-square test shows a chi-square level of 21.433 with an asymptotic significance level at .000, indicating that there is a significant correlation between the two variables. This means that people who have flown with BA have a higher likelihood of recalling them. A phi-level of .319 indicates that .3192 ≈ 10% of the differences in the category size of the variables are indicating, that respondents having traveled with BA earlier explains 10% of the variation in whether respondents recalls BA or not. The results from experiment B shows that 73.7% of the respondents who previously traveled with BA recalled the brand. That is an increase of 9.8% of respondents who recalled the brand. Chi- square level is .83 with a significance level of .36, which is telling us that the increase in respondents who recalled BA cannot be explained by the experiment. 7.1.4. Order of brand recall So far we have only looked into whether the respondents recalled BA or not. But as the order in which respondents remember brands also has value to the company, we will now be looking into whether there have been any changes in the order of the brand recall caused by the experiment. In the questionnaire the mean for mentioning BA was 4.965 and the median is 5, meaning that BA is most frequently recalled as the 5th brand. In the experiment the mean is 4.56 and the median is 4, indicating that most frequently respondents recalled BA as the 4th brand. Initially it seems as though the experiment has affected how long it takes for respondents to recall a brand. To test the significance of the differences in means, an independent samples t-test have been conducted. Levene’s test for equality of the variances have a p-value of .183, indicating that we cannot reject the possibility of the variances being similar. The t-test for equal variances assumed gives a p- value of .461, which means that we cannot reject the possibility that the means for the questionnaire and the experiment being similar in the population. Therefore there might not be any significant difference of the order in which people recalled a brand as a result of the experiment. 7.1.5. Importance of brand awareness To be able to evaluate how important it is to have brand awareness in the airline industry respondents were asked to indicate to what extent they agree that they only buy flight tickets from Page 56 of 105 airline companies they know and what priority brand awareness is, compared to other factors. It is believed that if people don’t make decisions based on brand awareness, but on other factors, such as price, it is not considered to be of great importance to have brand awareness in the airline industry. In question 13 respondents were asked to evaluate to what extent they agree to the statement I only buy flight tickets from airline companies I know which can be seen in figure 7.3. The mean of the answers is 2.93, and the lower and upper bounds for the 95% confidence interval is 2.8 and 3.06. This indicates that people tend to agree with this statement as the answer agree is labeled number 3. It further shows that 66% of the respondents either agrees or strongly agrees with the statement, indicating that a majority of respondents prefer to buy flight tickets from airlines companies they know. From this point of view it is considered important to have brand awareness in the industry. This does however not indicate to what extent brand awareness is a top priority or whether other factors have a higher priority. Therefore the respondents have been presented with different criteria and were asked to prioritize the criteria in ranked order. In this context the priority of brand awareness is widely distributed among all the possibilities, as seen in figure 7.4. Most respondents replied that brand awareness is their 5th priority; the mean is 4.39 with a lower and upper bound of 4.08 and 4.70. Figure 7.5 shows the distribution of the priorities, and it can be found that in general the respondents prioritize brand awareness 5th, next after assurance, flight patterns, reliability, and facilities. If the level of assurance is considered equal between competitors 10% 14% 14% 14% 16% 12% 11% 10% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Figure 7.4. Priority of brand awareness 9,1% 16,4% 44,5% 20,5% 3,6% Strongly disagree Disagree Agree Strongly agree Don't know Figure 7.3. Importance of brand awareness Page 57 of 105 and if the flight patterns and facilities that are offered by more airline companies are similar the brand will be determining what flight ticket the customer will end up purchasing. But if these factors are not considered similar then the brand will have no effect on the purchase decision. This implies that brand awareness do have an impact but only when companies are offering similar products. 7.2. Perceived quality Firstly this section will be looking into the factors that are affecting perceived quality in the airline industry. Hereafter it will be assessed to what extent the respondents evaluate BA according to these factors. The level of perceived quality in BA will furthermore be evaluated both as a result of the experiment A and B. 7.2.1. Quality indicators All quality indicators and their priority to the respondents can be found in figure 7.5. From this we can derive, that the number one indicator of quality is assurance, as this is the first priority to 46% percent of the respondents. This indicates that a brand, which is considered safe, is also conceived as a brand of high quality. Furthermore flight patterns are indicating brand quality as well as reliability since more than 50% of respondents chooses these as their top 3 factors. This indicates that the specific offers of flight schedules and frequencies, intermediate landings, whether 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Assurance Flight patterns Reliability Kindness of employees Employees appearance Facilities Customization Brand awareness Figure 7.5. Quality indicators Page 60 of 105 The same method has been applied for experiment A, and all the results can be seen in table 7.5 together with the results from experiment B. The important point here is, that none of the differences in the mean values were caused by the experiments. Experiment A F Sig. t df Sig. (2-tailed) Assurance 1.443 0.231 -0.758 171 0.45 Flight patterns 0.099 0.754 0.311 152 0.757 Reliability 0.272 0.603 0.692 160 0.49 Experiment B F Sig. t df Sig. (2-tailed) Assurance 10.264 0.002 0.91 167 0.368 Flight patterns 5.206 0.024 1.138 157 0.261 Reliability 1.902 0.17 0.188 161 0.851 Table 7.5. Independent samples t-test The fact that the responses from both the product placement and nudging experiments indicates that the direction of the relationship is different that hypothesized. A negative relationship between product placement or nudging and the perceived quality actually indicates that the marketing initiatives are not helpful to the level of perceived quality – it is actually decreasing the value of the brand. But as none of the results are significant it must be assumed that the negative change in perceived quality is random. Regardless of the differences measured in the mean values the overall perceived quality seems to be high among the respondents who actually had an opinion on the subject. Table 7.6 shows that in the questionnaire 41.1% of the respondents answered don’t know to the question concerning facilities, 31.6% to the question concerning reliability and 38.5% answered don’t know to either one or two of the questions concerning assurance. Assurance Reliability Facilities Don't know Answered Don't know Answered Don't know Answered Questionnaire 41.1% 58.9% 31.6% 68.4% 38.5% 61.5% Experiment A 25.0% 75.0% 15.0% 85.0% 25.0% 75.0% Experiment B 40.8% 59.2% 28.6% 71.4% 40.8% 59.2% Table 7.6. Level of respondents who answered don’t know The change in the level of respondents that answered don’t know have not changed much as a result of experiment B. But the levels of all three factors seem to have decreased considerably as a Page 61 of 105 result of experiment A and therefore a chi-square test has been made to establish if the changes are significant. Pearson’s chi-square for the reliability-factor is 4.417 with an asymptotic significance of .036. This tells us that the level of respondents who answered don’t know to the question concerning reliability has changed at a significant level as a result of experiment A. However, for the other two factors the chi-square values are 2.604 (assurance) and 3.605 (facilities) with p-levels of .107 and .058 respectively, which tells us that the changes in these two factors are not significantly different from the questionnaire at a 95% confidence level. So even though fewer respondents answered don’t know as a result of the experiment, only the changes in the reliability-factor were significant, and can thus be described as an effect of the independent variable. 7.2.3. Price as a quality indicator Additionally to the established quality indicators in the industry theory on perceived quality argues that price can be an indicator of quality. Thus, products that are considered to be of high quality will also be perceived to be more expensive. To evaluate how respondents evaluate the price-level of BA they were asked to answer the question to what extent do you agree that it is cheap traveling with BA? The mean value of the questionnaire is 3.10 and the median is 3, which means that generally respondents neither agree nor disagree that the prices traveling with BA are low. Again a high share of the respondents have answered don’t know indicating that they have no perception of the price range at BA. The mean for experiment B is 2.62 with a median of 3, and therefore initially the same conclusion as from the questionnaire is valid for experiment B. Furthermore, it can be seen in figure 7.7 that the level of people who disagree has increased as a result of experiment A from 1% 8% 26% 13% 1% 37% 5% 50% 20% 15% 0% 10% 2% 22% 31% 4% 0% 41% Strongly disagree Disagree Neither agree nor disagree Agree Strongly agree Don't know Figure 7.7. Evaluation of price Questionnaire Experiment A Experiment B Page 62 of 105 8% to 50%. The mean value for experiment A is 2.5 and the median is 2, suggesting that the participants in experiment A disagrees that it is cheap traveling with BA. As the dependent variable is interval-scaled and the independent variable is nominal in Analysis of variance (ANOVA) have been made to test whether the experiments have had any significant impact on the mean values. The results from the ANOVA can be found in appendix G. The F-value is 10.53 with a significance of .000. The F-value is greater than the critical value why we have to assume that there are some differences between the groups. However a test of the homogeneity of variances tells us, with a p- level of .195 that we cannot reject the possibility of some of the groups have similar variances, and we therefore have to apply Scheffe’s test for variability to determine the differences in mean values. 95% Confidence Interval Mean Difference Std. Error Sig. Lower Bound Upper Bound Product placement .48211 0.1608 .013 0.085 0.8792 Nudging .60280 0.14799 0 0.2373 0.9683 Table 7.7. Scheffe’s Test for multiple comparisons (Price) Scheffe’s test actually shows that there has been a significant decrease in the mean values both as a result from experiment A and B. As the mean has decreased it indicates that both experiments have affected participants to believe that the price for flying with BA are high. Thus, if the perceived level of price is indicating a perceived quality the participants in both experiments are expressing an increased level of perceived quality. 7.3. Brand Associations When measuring the strength of the brand associations different questions are asked concerning the three brand values – in total 11 questions are asked. This section will be looking into the strengths of the brand associations in BA and whether these associations have been affected by the experiments. It is expected that both product placement and nudging will have a positive effect on the brand associations. Figure 7.8 shows the overall assessment of BA from the questionnaire. Only very few respondents responded negatively to the statements, indicating that BA does not have bad rumors. However, the same tendency occurs in these measurements, where a lot of respondents answered don’t know. It thus seems as though respondents do not have any associations linked to BA’s brand or that they are not able to evaluate them based on the stated parameters. They might have some associations linked to the brand that has not been looked into here. Page 65 of 105 suggested that respondents are positive toward the brand association, but that thoughtful service seems to be evaluated somewhere between neither good nor bad and good. In figure 7.10 we can see that the only mean that is measured higher after both experiments the thoughtful service category with mean values of 3.74 (questionnaire), 3.76 (product placement), and 3.79 (nudging). Thus, this is the only factor that has been positively affected by both marketing initiatives. Furthermore the mean for forthcoming service, 3.71, has increased after product placement to 3.83, but decreased as a result of nudging to 3.58. It is the other way around with thoughtful service, where product placement has caused the mean to decrease from 3.64 to 3.56 and nudging has caused the mean to increase to 3.67. In the last category considerate service the mean has decreased from 3.64 both after product placement to 3.56 and in nudging to 3.50. Thus, it seems that there is no single direction in which the factors are affected. As with the previous association an ANOVA has been made to establish if any significant changes to the means can be measured. The F-values of these measurements are ranging from .059 to 1.575. All the F-values can be found in appendix H. The one thing that all F-values have in common is, that they are not significant, indicating that the variances are similar. Furthermore the differences in all the mean values are not significantly different, as none of the significance levels in Sheffe’s test were higher that .05. This suggests that we cannot reject the hypothesis that the experiments have no effect on these brand associations. 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6 3,7 3,8 Questionnaire Product placement Nudging Figure 7.10. Mean values of brand associations: Thoughtful service Forthcoming staff Treats customers as individuals Considerate service Good service Page 66 of 105 7.3.3. Flying know-how Flying know-how includes BA’s many years of flying experience, professionalism of current employees, and innovation. When looking and the means measured in the variables it firstly is clear that innovation is evaluated lower than the other two variables. The mean from the questionnaire is 3.05 indicating that BA’s is neither is evaluated as an innovative brand nor as a non-innovative brand. The mean values for the other two variables; flying experience and professionalism is evaluated at 4.35 and 3.94. It seems that respondents agree that BA both have many years of flying experience and are professionals within their field of work. Similar for all measurements is that the mean values have fallen as a result of product placement. It thus appears that the way BA’s brand is presented by product placement have changed peoples attitude to a more negative view of their flying know-how. The same goes for the means in nudging when it comes to years of flying experience and professionalism. In the innovation measurement there has been a slight increase as a result of nudging. Over all it seems that both product placement and nudging primarily has had a negative effect on the brand association flying know- how. When looking at the F-values from the ANOVA it seems that there is significant differences in the variances in two of the measures; years of flying experience and professionalism with a p-level of 2,9 3,1 3,3 3,5 3,7 3,9 4,1 4,3 Questionnaire Product placement Nudging Figure 7.11. Brand associations: Flying know-how Innovation Years of flying experience professionals Page 67 of 105 .004 and .0522. As a result the differences in the mean values are evaluated by Dunnet T3 as opposed to Scheffe’s test. In the category years of flying experience there is a significant difference in mean values between the questionnaire and the product placement experiment, suggesting a decrease of .404 with a significance level of .025. In the nudging experiment there is not found any significant difference. This indicates that by using product placement to affect the brand awareness about BA’s many years of flying experience the product placement will have a negative effect. In regard to professionalism the difference in mean values between the questionnaire and product placement is a decrease by .32. The p-value is .10, and is thus not significant at the applied 5%- level. No significant differences in means were found between the questionnaire and the nudging experiment. Furthermore there were no significant differences in the mean values for the innovation measure, evaluated by Scheffe’s test. 7.4. Brand loyalty In this section we will be looking further into how loyal customers are to brands in the airline industry. Respondents have been asked to evaluate to what extent different criteria affects their purchase decision. This will establish the level of brand loyalty in the industry. We will furthermore be looking into the specific level of brand loyalty and customer share of BA. Brand loyalty has been examined together with other influencing factors. All factors can be seen in table 7.8 along with the measured mean levels. Questionnaire Product placement Nudging Direct flight 4.30 4.19 3.90 Price 4.25 4.35 4.35 Luggage included in the price 3.45 3.65 3.75 Brand awareness 3.31 2.94 3.25 Seat reservation 2.52 2.57 2.40 Food and drinks served on board 2.22 2.37 2.00 Booking of flight and hotel 2.08 1.77 1.95 Table 7.8. Mean values for purchase criteria The levels of the means are ranging from 2.08 (not important) to 4.30 (important), where a direct flight and price are considered very important, as the mean levels are 4.30 and 4.25 respectively, and the median of these factors are 5. The mean levels are indicating that on average it is considered important. Furthermore luggage is considered important as this factor has a mean of 2 Even thought the p-value is > .05 it is examined at a significant level. Page 70 of 105 respondents, 5.31% indicate that BA is one of the only airlines they would consider traveling with. The upper and lower bound of the mean are .023 and .084 indicating that between 2.3% and 8.4% of the population would be evaluated as somewhat brand loyal to BA. The only airline companies that have committed loyal buyers who would not consider traveling with any of the other airline companies are SAS, Ryanair, Norwegian, Air Berlin, and Lufthansa. It must however be noted that the number of respondents who answered they only would fly with one of the airlines are considered very low. As an example 1.4% of the respondents answered they only would consider flying with SAS. The share of respondents who would only fly with the other airlines are lower than the one for SAS, indicating that SAS has the highest share of loyal customers in Denmark. 8. Results This section will be looking into the results that can be drawn from the analysis of the collected data. All parts of brand equity will be evaluated along with the associated hypotheses and give some insight into the conclusions that can be made on the basis of the research conducted as a result of this paper. 8.1. Brand awareness The hypothesis concerning brand awareness is h3B: product placement will have a positive effect on brand awareness. Brand awareness is composed of two different elements; brand recognition and brand recall. So to be able to accept or rejection the hypothesis it depends on both the elements. An overall assessment of the brand awareness indicates, that BA has a good brand recall at about 32% to 45% and high brand recognition at 90% to 96%. But this also appears to be a general tendency in the industry, where competitors such as Norwegian, Ryan Air, SAS, Lufthansa, and Air Berlin outperform BA. However, as a result of the product placement experiment the brand recognition decreased. This result is not as expected, as it is indicating that the relationship is negative. However, there was not found any significant effect in the level of brand recognition, Page 71 of 105 meaning that the decrease in brand recognition was not caused by the experiment, but is a random change. The unaided recall test showed a different result; the brand recall increased from 38% to 51%, indicating a positive relationship, as expected. Thus, based on these results it seems that more people recalled the brand after having seen the movie containing product placement. However, none of these results were found to be significant either, which means that also these differences in recall cannot be assigned by randomness. The measured level of brand recall of BA is not considered to reflect of top-of-mind brand awareness, but is not considered to be low either. Compared to the competitors in the industry, BA is not the most recalled brand, but the 5th most recalled, which has not changed as a result of product placement. Furthermore it has been established that brand awareness is considered a competitive advantage as brand awareness to some extent is affecting the decision to buy a specific flight ticket. It is found that the importance of brand recognition in the industry is not a top priority to travelers – it is a fifth priority next after assurance, flight patterns, facilities, and reliability. This indicates that having brand awareness becomes important when competitors are evaluated to be similar on the other factors. Thus, if two brands are evaluated to be equally safe, offer the same flight details, are considered equally reliable, and offer the same facilities people will choose the airline that is familiar to them. To be competitive these four parts should be attended to first. But if there is similarity in these factors brand awareness becomes the decisive factor. Additionally, a tendency showed that people who had traveled with BA earlier were more prone to recall the brand. Thus, respondents who previously traveled with BA have higher brand awareness level than people who haven’t. Results shows that about 10% of the brand recall can be explained by earlier travels with the airline. Even though 10% is not much, it is still considered important knowledge. So based on these results it must be concluded that past traveling experience has a positive influence on brand awareness. These findings lack the significance for us to be able to accept the hypothesis that product placement has a positive effect on brand awareness. Based on the findings it seems that product placement has no effect on brand awareness and thus we are not able to reject the possibility of product placement not having any effect either. Page 72 of 105 8.2. Perceived quality To be able to evaluate BA’s perceived quality it was necessary to find out which elements in the airline industry that are perceived to be quality indicators. The results showed that assurance, flight patterns and reliability are indicators of quality as more than a third of respondents evaluated these three elements as their top three priority. The hypothesis concerning perceived quality is h3A: nudging will have a positive effect on perceived quality. The assessment of BA on all three criteria is positive, assurance and reliability both with a mean at approximately 4 is indicating that people agree that BA is a safe and reliable airline. Furthermore a mean of 3.83 indicates that respondents also are positive towards the range of flight patterns offered, but that they are evaluated a little lower that the other two. This in general gives a positive image of the perceived quality of BA. Furthermore the mean values of the product placement experiment were measured and compared to those of the questionnaire. Here, all mean values had decreased as a result of the product placement experiment. This decrease in mean indicates that product placement has a negative impact on the perceived quality. The significance levels however, indicates that also these decreases in values are not significant and therefore cannot be explained by the experiment, but are results of insignificant randomness in the answers. When it comes to the hypothesis that nudging will have a positive effect on perceived quality it however becomes a little doubtful. Only the level of assurance has increased based on the experiment. Both the level of reliability and flight patterns has decreased. This, again, opposite the expectations, shows that the predominance is that nudging has a negative effect on the perceived quality. But as the differences in means are so small and the sample size also is small, there were found no significant differences in the mean values. This indicates that the differences measured thus cannot be assigned the effect of the experiment. It has additionally been argued that price can be an indicator of quality. The results from the questionnaire suggest that respondents perceive BA as neither cheap nor expensive, but somewhere in the middle. If that is to be translated into perceived quality BA is not considered a top-quality brand but is not considered a low-quality brand either. Both product placement and nudging had a significant effect on the perceived level of quality, as more respondents replied that Page 75 of 105 included in the ticket. Thereafter come the brand and the possibility to reserve a seat. Thus, when customers are buying flight tickets they are more affected by price, than by the brand, and so, if customers can get a cheaper ticket they will switch brand. The experiments did not affect the overall priority-levels significantly, which means that the priorities are still the same regardless of the experiments. Secondly, the measured market share among the ten airline companies was measured to be 6.57%, compared to a market share in Copenhagen Airport of 2%. The respondents who traveled with BA within the last two years have on average flown with them 2.3 times. In the population between 72% and 81% would consider traveling with BA. The intention to travel with BA has not been significantly affected by any of the experiments. None of the respondents are committed byers of the BA brand, indicating that the brand loyalty is very low. On the other hand 10.2% to 18.2% of the population would be willing to travel with all the proposed airlines. This indicates that the between 10.2% and 18.2% of the population is indifferent to brand and are therefor not considered loyal customers, as they will change brand based on the criteria as mentioned: direct flights, price, etc. Over all it has been confirmed that nothing in relation to brand loyalty is affected by the experiments. Thus, the hypotheses are accepted, and we have not been able to reject the possibility that product placement and nudging doesn’t have an effect on brand loyalty. As the results of all the underlying hypotheses now have been looked into, we can evaluate the overall results of the two hypotheses h0A: Nudging has no effect on brand equity. And h0B: Product placement has no effect on brand equity. As we have not found any significant results contradicting these hypotheses, we are not able to reject the null-hypotheses. This means that as far as the results in this research have come, we do not know whether the marketing initiatives have any effect or not. But the results tell us, that we are not able to reject to possibility that they do not have any effect. Page 76 of 105 9. Discussion To BA the results of this paper have brought knowledge to the effectiveness of the branding activities they are currently using in Denmark. Knowing that marketing initiatives such as product placement and nudging suggestively have no effect on their brand equity it is important for them to consider the consequences hereof. In this section we will be discussing the usefulness of the results and what they mean to BA. 9.1. Brand awareness The measured level of brand awareness in Denmark is considered positive for BA. The Danish population seems to be aware that BA is part of the airline industry. Because it is important for many Danish customers to fly with airline companies they know brand awareness is considered important. But as it also have been established that it is a general tendency in the industry that there is a high level of brand awareness. It is thus considered to be value adding to increase the level of brand awareness even further, and in particular the level of brand recall, to ensure that a high number of potential customers know BA’s brand. Working with brand awareness in the future BA should take advantage of the high level of brand recognition in order to increase the level of brand recall. According to Aaker (1991) brand recognition is more easily built, and brand recall requires a more in-depth learning experience or many repetitions. Based on the findings of this paper product placement does not have any significant impact on people to be able to increase brand recall. This is indicating that either product placement is not an experience providing the required learnings about BA to consumers. Or the level of repetition is considered too low to create brand recall. The brand is presented 3 times in the movie, so a solution could be to increase the number of times the brand appears. Another solution would be to expose people to the movie more than once. But it is not necessarily given that people will watch a movie more than one time, a thus this method to increase the number of repetition might be a questionable method. It can therefore be discussed whether product placement is an optimal way of working with brand recall. On the one hand the potential to increase the number of repetitions in the movie is a valid solution to the lack of effect. But on the other hand it might be easier or more effective for BA to consider other marketing initiatives with a more constant exposure. Page 77 of 105 9.2. Perceived quality The quality indicators in the industry have shown that the overall level of perceived quality of BA is positive. But the effects measured as a result of nudging and product placement showed no effect of the marketing initiatives. Furthermore a large share of respondents is not able to evaluate their opinion on BA’s level of quality. Thus, these findings are useful to BA in order to decide whether they want to focus on increasing the level of perceived quality or whether they want to focus on affecting people who don’t have an opinion at the moment. Either way, the effects of nudging and product placement seem to be limited. The lack of effect could also be restricted by the actual quality of the brand. According to Aaker ”the first step toward improving perceived quality is to develop the capability of delivering high- quality levels. It usually is wasteful to attempt to convince customers that quality is high when it is not” (Aaker, 1991:94). For BA this means that to be able to affect the level of perceived quality they might first assess their level of actual quality. To evaluate the level of perceived quality people would typically look for a signal or indicator of a quality dimension. Thus, in order for product placement to work BA might look further into what indicators people look for, and specifically include these indicators in the product placement or nudging. That way people will be exposed specifically to a quality indicator and the effectiveness of the initiative might increase. An example of an indicator in the service industry could be appearance of staff or facilities (Aaker, 1991). 9.3. Brand associations The measured level of brand associations is considered positive, indicating that the respondents generally associate BA with the brand values British style, thoughtful service and flying know-how. But it also seems that many people don’t have any associations linked to the brand. Thus, instead of working on increasing the strength of the associations that are held by some people, a recommendation is to focus on creating the brand associations with people who don’t have any at the moment. By increasing the number of people who holds brand associations, as opposed to increasing the level of strength of the associations, BA will increase the differentiation of the brand from competitors. As this paper has shown limited potential to create brand associations by using nudging and product placement it is advised that other methods are used. Furthermore, as it also has been assessed that nudging and product placement are not affecting the level of brand Page 80 of 105 11. Conclusions This paper has been measuring the effect that the marketing initiatives nudging and product placement have on brand equity in British Airways. Overall no significant impact has been measured, and there is thus not found any arguments supporting a rejection of the null-hypotheses h0A and h0B. This paper is a deductive study of the relationship between marketing initiatives and brand equity. One questionnaire and two quasi-experiments have provided the data in the paper. The questionnaire is an online self-completion questionnaire that has been used to assess the level of brand equity is BA. The two quasi-experiments have been used to test the effect of the marketing initiatives by exposing a group of participants to them and thereafter measuring the level of brand equity. We can conclude that the sample is not representative of the population as a great deal of sampling error was found. Furthermore the questionnaire is considered reliable but not valid to the same extent. We can conclude that generalizing the findings beyond the scope of this paper will not make much sense, as there are too many statistical biases affecting the research, which provides a generalization with very little use. Based on the analysis and the results of this paper it can be concluded that BA overall has a positive level of brand equity. None of the elements of brand equity has been measured negatively. Concerning brand awareness it can be concluded that BA has brand recognition of 93% and brand recall of 38%. It can also be concluded that product placement did not affect the level of brand awareness significantly. Brand awareness is not a top priority to customers when buying a flight ticket. Therefore brand awareness only becomes a decisive factor when other factors such as assurance, reliability, facilities and flight patterns offered by different companies are considered to be similar. When it comes to perceived quality it can be concluded that the level of perceived quality of BA is generally high. The factors that seem to indicate quality in the industry are assurance, reliability and flight patterns. However, none of these were affected by the experiments. The only factor that was positively affected by both the nudging and product placement experiment was the perception of price. It can thus be concluded that only one quality indicator has been successfully affected as a result of the experiments. Furthermore is can be concluded that a large share of the respondents don’t have any opinion on BA’s level of quality. This has not been changed as a result of the Page 81 of 105 marketing initiatives, indicating that they are not optimal methods when you wish to create opinions. The brand associations that have been evaluated in BA are British Style, Thoughtful service and flying know-how. The results are very similar to the indicators of perceived quality: we can conclude that none of the associations were affected as a result of the two experiments. Furthermore a great share of respondents doesn’t have any associations linked to the brand. We must also in this section conclude that the uses of nudging and product placement have generally not been able to affect any of the results. In relation to the last part of brand equity, which is brand loyalty, we can conclude that BA does not have any loyal customers among the respondents. Furthermore we can conclude that generally respondents are fairly price sensitive, indicating that the specific brand is not considered as important as the price of a ticket. Other indicators that can be concluded to be more important than the brand are direct flights and luggage allowances. Based on the analysis made in the third section of the paper it can be concluded that the research that has been conducted shows, that there is no support to reject the null-hypothesis h0A and h0B, indicating that the experiments done with nudging and product placement had no significant effect on the levels of brand equity. Furthermore it can be concluded that additional research on the field is necessary to be able to establish the significance of the effects. Furthermore some changes in the setup are recommended as it can be concluded that the strengths of the manipulations in this paper has not been sufficient to yield results. Lastly it can be concluded that these findings are important to BA as they provide suggestions to how they can manage their brand more effectively in the future. We can conclude that either some adjustments to the initiatives can be made or other initiatives should be considered. Page 82 of 105 12. Bibliography Aaker, D. A. (1991). Managing brand equity: Capitalizing on the value of a brand name. New York: Aaker, D. A. (1996). Building strong brands. New York, NY [u.a.]: Free Press. Aaker, D. A., & McLoughlin, D. (2007). Strategic market management (European ed. ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Allcott, H., & Kessler, J. (2015). The welfare effects of nudges: A case study of energy use social comparisons. Cambridge, MA: Bagwell, K. (2007). Chapter 28 the economic analysis of advertising. 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Københavns lufthavn., 2016, from https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Københavns_Lufthavn#Destinationer_og_flyselskaber Page 86 of 105 13. Appendix 13.1. Appendix A – the questionnaire Angiv venligst dit køn (Angiv kun ét svar) q Mand q Kvinde Hvilket år er du født? (Angiv værdi) _ _ _ _ _ _ Hvad er din jobstatus? (Angiv kun ét svar) Jeg har et fuldtidsjob Jeg har et deltidsjob Jeg er arbejdssøgende Jeg er studerende q q q q q Jeg er udenfor arbejdsmarkedet (uddyb venligst) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Hvad er din årlige indkomst? (Angiv kun ét svar) q 0 - 199.999 q 200.000 - 399.999 q 400.000 - 599.999 q 600.000 - 799.999 q 800.000 - q Jeg ønsker ikke at svare på dette spørgsmål Page 87 of 105 Angiv venligst dit postnummer (Angiv værdi mellem 0 og 9999) _ _ _ _ _ _ Hvilke flyselskaber kender du? Nævn så mange du kan komme i tanke om, og skriv ét selskab pr. felt. Hvis du ikke kan komme i tanke om nogen kan du blot gå videre i spørgeskemaet. 1. ______________________________ 2. ______________________________ 3. ______________________________ 4. ______________________________ 5. ______________________________ 6. ______________________________ 7. ______________________________ 8. ______________________________ 9. ______________________________ 10. ______________________________ Hvilke af nedenstående flyselskaber kender du? Markér alle dem, du kender. q Lufthansa q Ryanair q British Airways q Air France q easyJet q Turkish Airlines q Aeroflot q Air Berlin q SAS Page 90 of 105 Hvilke af nedenstående flyselskaber ville du overveje at flyve med? (Angiv gerne flere svar) q Lufthansa q Ryanair q British Airways q Air France q easyJet q Turkish Airlines q Aeroflot q Air Berlin q SAS q Norwegian q Ingen af ovenstående q Ved ikke Hvor søger du oftest efter information om flyafgange? (Angiv kun ét svar) q Via en søgemaskine (eksempelvis momondo eller travelmarket) q Via et rejseselskab (eksempelvis Spies eller Star Tour) q Direkte via flyselskabets egen hjemmeside (eksempelvis British Airways) q På lufthavnens hjemmeside (eksempelvis Københavns Lufthavn) q Pr. telefon Andet _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Page 91 of 105 Hvor enig er du i følgende udsagn? (Angiv kun et svar pr. spørgsmål) Meget uenig Overvejende uenig Overvejende enig Meget enig Ved ikke Jeg køber kun flybilletter ved flyselskaber jeg kender q q q q q I hvor høj grad har de nedenstående kriterier indflydelse på dit køb af flybillet? (Angiv kun et svar pr. spørgsmål) I meget lav grad I lav grad I middel grad I høj grad I meget høj grad Ved ikke At billetten er billig q q q q q q At der bliver serveret mad og drikke om bord q q q q q q At jeg kender flyselskabet q q q q q q At billetten inkluderer baggage q q q q q q At jeg selv kan bestemme min plads q q q q q q At jeg kan købe flybillet og hotel samlet q q q q q q At jeg kan flyve direkte til min ønskede destination q q q q q q Andet q q q q q q Page 92 of 105 Prioritér venligst hvad du lægger vægt på, når du skal ud at flyve (Foretag en prioritering med tallene fra 1-8, hvor 1 er bedst) Sikkerhed ________ Rutedetaljer (antal skift, afgangstidspunkt) ________ Pålidelighed (at flyet ankommer til tiden) ________ Imødekommenhed hos personalet ________ Personalets påklædning og personlige fremtræden ________ Faciliteter (check-in- og bagageservice, faciliteter om bord, fast-track) ________ Personlige behov ________ At jeg kender flyselskabet ________ Hvor enig er du i følgende udsagn? Du behøver ikke have fløjet med British Airways for at kunne svare, du skal blot vurdere udsagnene baseret på dit nuværende kendskab. (Angiv kun et svar pr. spørgsmål) Meget uenig Uenig Hverken enig eller uenig Enig Meget enig Ved ikke British Airways tilbyder et attraktivt udbud af rejser q q q q q q British Airways har en god check-in og q q q q q q Page 95 of 105 13.2. Appendix B – pilot question O th er at je g ka n ko m m e af s te d på ø ns ke de da to er Ve nt et id 4. O ve rs ku el ig hj em m es id e ko rt re js et id . D es tin at io n, fly ve tid . D es tin at io n. ve nt et id i lu fth av ne . hu rti gt ig en ne m lu fth av ne n fl yt id sp un kt Fo od a nd dr in ks Ik ke a lle d e fo rs ke llig e til kø b (m ad ) in kl us iv e tin g i pr is en B ra nd aw ar en es s Fl ys el sk ab /b ra nd (if t. om dø m m e, tro væ rd ig he d, st ab ilit et ). Vi rk so m he d O g ev t f ly se ls ka b tid lig er e er fa rin g m ed fl ys el sk ab et Lu gg ag e al lo w an ce s Ik ke a lle d e fo rs ke llig e til kø b (b ag ag e) in kl us iv e tin g i pr is en Se at re se rv at io n Ik ke a lle d e fo rs ke llig e til kø b (p la ds ) fr it sæ de va lg o g in kl us iv e tin g i pr is en D ire ct fl ig ht An ta l s ki ft un de r re js en . D ire kt e fly ti l di st in at io ne n få e lle r i ng en s ki ft. Få m el le m la nd in ge r. Fl ys ki ft. an ta l s ki ft. di re kt e fly vn in ge r. an ta l o g tid b ru gt p å om st ig ni ng er , Pr ic e "P ris " "P ris " "B illi g bi lle t" "P ris " "P ris " "P ris " "P ris " "P ris " 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Page 96 of 105 13.3. Appendix C – guide to experiment A Baggrund Forestil dig at du skal ud og rejse. Du skal holde en uges ferie i London sammen med nogen du holder af. Det er dig, der er ansvarlig for at købe billetterne, og du har besluttet at i skal flyve med British Airways. Du skal købe billetterne via deres hjemmeside: www.britishairways.com. Du bedes forestille dig, at du rent faktisk er i gang med at foretage et køb. Prøv at vurdere dit køb så realistisk som muligt. Overvej hvad du normalt lægger vægt på, når du køber flybilletter, og lad det have indflydelse på dine valg. Sådan gør du • Beslut dig for, hvem du vil rejse med. Det kan være en ven/veninde/kæreste/ægtefælle/din familie. • Gå ind på www.britishairways.com • Søg efter en rejse, der passer dine kriterier • En uges varighed • Antallet af passagerer • Destination: London • Din ønskede afgangs-lufthavn • Vurdér de foreslåede muligheder • Hvilken afgang lever op til dine krav til en flybillet? • Vælg den afgang, du synes lever op til dine forventninger og fortsæt i processen (Economy hand bagage only / Economy with checked bagage / Business Class) • Vurdér hvorvidt billetterne passer til dine behov og ønsker, og foretag eventuelle justeringer indtil du når punkt 3: ”Passengers”. • Afbryd processen, og luk siden ned. Svar på spørgeskemaet ved at åbne dette link: https://survey.enalyzer.com/?pid=h7r7pina Page 97 of 105 13.4. Appendix D – invitation to experiment B Som en del af min kandidatafhandling afholder jeg et biograf-event. Har du lyst til at komme en tur i biografen helt gratis? Så tilmeld dig eventet eller send mig en mail på peha10ac@student.cbs.dk. Det eneste krav er: jeg bestemmer filmen! :) Filmen bliver vist i Nordisk Films medarbejderbiograf Kinografen, og der vil selvfølgelig være popcorn og sodavand. Efter filmen skal du udfylde et spørgeskema - men bare rolig. Det tager kun 10 minutter. Du er selvfølgelig velkommen til at tage en ven/veninde/ægtefælle eller andet godt selskab med. Hjælp mig med at få fyldt salen så mit speciale kan blive skrevet færdigt - jeg glæder mig til at se jer!