The power of a brand resides in the minds of consumers. It's much more than just awareness or recall. It's about building and maintaining distinctive relationships with your customers, and over time, developing a deep and powerful connection when your brand is fully "in synch" with consumers' needs, wants and preferences.

"Loyalty" for us is a behavioral outcome, not an attitude or an attribute of a brand, whether functionally or non-functionally defined. Nor is "loyalty" merely a stated preference towards a brand. Loyalty, rather, is a pattern of behavior we, as researchers, are trying to explain and predict through our research. Loyalty is a pattern of behavior your brands are trying to enhance among current and potential customers through current and future business activities as a result of the insight and understanding gained from brand research.

Our understanding of brands needs to focus on both functional and non-functional benefits the brands deliver, or fail to deliver. KN believes it is possible to derive generic measures of functional benefits, developing relevant and specific measures for each category and product, though obviously certain measures are commonly used (for example, innovative, high quality, reliable). Functional benefits or performance can be seen as "necessary" but not "sufficient" to determine brand choice.

Nonfunctional aspects are increasingly the key to the differentiation customers themselves see among alternative brands in the marketplace. The perceived delivery by the brand of superior non-functional benefits is what closes the sale for the customer.

Brand researchers also can be greatly frustrated at the extent to which expressed customer preferences (attitudes) do not match up with the actions customers take in the marketplace (behaviors). We believe these critical inhibiting or intervening ("extrinsic") factors need to be accounted for – pre-existent consumer dispositions as well as distribution/availability issues. Measuring these "filter" issues systematically and thoroughly enables better understanding of the real-world dynamics actually driving customer choice in the marketplace.