While going through my research archives looking for something else, I rediscovered a piece of McKinsey research from late 1996 with this title. It was a meta-study of 27 individual studies that examined the importance of brand as a driver of purchase behavior across a number of business categories.
Their finding was that, on average across the B2B and B2C markets studied, brand accounted for 18% of the total purchase decision. The figure ranged from 3-12% for consumer purchases of computers (3 US studies) to 36-39% for consumer purchases of computers (3 European studies).
Their research also revealed that, in 17 of the 27 studies, there was a “brand loyal” segment for whom brand was the determinant factor in their purchase decision. The size of this segement varied from 10% in retail banking to 35% in telecoms, with an average of 21% across the 17 studies.
It is interesting that similar results about the economic significance of brands are produced by a variety of different approaches.
