Brand Funnel Analysis
The five-stage brand funnel model, the metrics behind it and how to track it
What is a brand funnel?
A brand funnel is a model that measures how many people move from knowing a brand to being loyal to it. The Vision One brand funnel has five stages: awareness, interest, trial, satisfaction and loyalty. Measuring each stage shows where customers drop out, which stage marketing should fix first and what that fix is worth.
The model is sometimes called the brand pyramid: the same stages drawn as a pyramid rather than a funnel. Either way, the shape tells the story. A wide top and a narrow bottom means the brand is known but not chosen. A funnel that stays wide converts awareness into loyal customers.
The brand funnel is an integral part of BrandVision, our brand tracking research approach, and it sits inside the eight metrics on the Brand Equity Wheel (brand equity measurement). Awareness feeds Mindshare, interest feeds Brand Magnetism, and satisfaction and loyalty are read alongside Net Promoter Score.
We measure the funnel by survey among your target market, not among your customers alone, so the top of the funnel is real and the drop-off at each stage can be compared with your competitors.
The brand funnel model: five stages from awareness to loyalty
Each stage is one question asked of the same sample of your target market. The percentage who say yes at each stage is the funnel.
Other brand funnel models label the middle stages consideration, purchase and usage. The Vision One model uses interest, trial and satisfaction because they separate wanting the brand from buying it, and buying it from being happy with it. That separation is where the useful findings sit.
Five questions. One picture of your brand.
Awarenes
Do people know the brand exists? Measured as prompted awareness (recognising the name from a list) and spontaneous awareness (naming it unprompted). Together this is Mindshare on the Brand Equity Wheel, and it sets the ceiling for every stage below. See brand awareness tracking.
Interest
Of those aware, how many find the brand appealing or would consider it? This is Brand Magnetism: the pull the brand has on the people who already know it. A big drop here is a relevance or positioning problem, not a media problem.
Trial
Of those interested, how many have bought or used the brand? A gap between interest and trial usually points to availability, price or a weak reason to act now.
Satisfaction
Of those who have tried the brand, how many were satisfied? This stage tells you whether the product keeps the promise the brand made. Until the experience is fixed, loyalty work is wasted. See customer satisfaction surveys.
Loyalty
Of those satisfied, how many buy again, prefer the brand or recommend it? Brand loyalty is read with NPS research. The strongest brands keep the funnel wide to the bottom: satisfied customers who become promoters and sell the brand for you.
Brand funnel metrics and analysis: how to read your funnel
The stage scores are the headline. The conversion rates between stages are the analysis. Divide each stage by the one above it and you get a set of ratios that show exactly where the brand leaks.
A worked example: 80% aware, 40% interested, 24% have tried, 20% satisfied, 12% loyal. Awareness converts to interest at 50%, interest to trial at 60%, trial to satisfaction at 83% and satisfaction to loyalty at 60%. The weakest link is the first one. Half the people who know this brand have no interest in it, so more awareness spend would pour water into a leaking bucket. The fix is relevance.
Your goal as a brand owner is the same whatever the shape: the largest possible number of loyalists and promoters who sell the brand for you.
Report both the stage score and the conversion from the stage above. Two brands can share the same loyalty score with very different problems: one lacks awareness, the other converts awareness poorly. Tracking the ratios over time shows whether a campaign moved the stage it was meant to move.
Indifferent brands have skinny funnels: low interest, low trial and low loyalty. Brands that are liked but not loved have high interest and trial but lose people at loyalty, because there is no emotional connection. The strongest brands keep the funnel wide all the way down, with strong emotional branding scores and high purchase, repeat and loyalty rates.
Because customer spend can be attributed to each level of the funnel, the model is also a financial tool. Multiply the people in each tier by their average spend and you can see what moving five per cent of satisfied customers into loyal customers is worth. That number is usually the strongest argument for the brand budget.
Run the same five questions for your main competitors and for key segments: age, region, customers and non-customers. A funnel that looks healthy overall can hide a segment where interest collapses, and that segment is usually where the growth is.
Brand health funnel: where the funnel sits in brand health tracking
A brand health funnel is the brand funnel measured inside a brand health study, so each stage can be read next to the other health metrics. On its own, the funnel shows where people drop out. With brand health, it shows why.
Brand health tracking
The eight Brand Equity Wheel metrics explain the funnel: Mindshare behind awareness, Magnetism behind interest, Brand Love and Emotion behind loyalty.
Brand Momentum
Momentum shows where the funnel is heading. A brand with rising momentum widens its funnel in the next wave. A brand losing momentum is about to narrow.
Brand Equity Score
The funnel and the eight metrics roll up into the Brand Equity Score, the single number we use to track overall brand health from wave to wave.
All three are measured in the same study, tracked in waves or continuously, and reported in one dashboard.
Brand funnel research with Vision One
We have measured brand funnels for consumer and B2B brands for more than 25 years, as part of brand tracking, brand health and one-off brand research studies. Every funnel study includes:
- The five-stage funnel measured among your target market, not only your customers
- Competitor funnels on the same questions, so every ratio is comparable
- Segment funnels: age, region, customer and non-customer, buyer type
- Conversion analysis that names the stage to fix first and what fixing it is worth
- Tracking in waves or continuously, reported in a live dashboard
- The funnel read alongside Brand Momentum, Brand Love and the Brand Equity Score
- ISO 20252:2012 accredited, MRS Company Partners, rated 9.4 out of 10 by UK research buyers
Brand tracking studies that include the funnel start from £8,000, quoted fixed before work begins. New to tracking? Download the brand tracking guide for the questions, sample sizes and reporting to expect.
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Q&A Vision One’s brand research solutions
The Vision One brand funnel has five stages: awareness, interest, trial, satisfaction and loyalty. Each is a survey question asked of the same target market sample, and each stage is a subset of the one above it. Other models use consideration, purchase and usage for the middle stages. The names differ, the logic is the same.
A marketing funnel tracks the leads and sales a campaign generates, usually from web and CRM data. A brand funnel (sometimes called a brand marketing funnel) measures the whole market by survey, including people who have never visited your website. Marketing funnel metrics tell you how a campaign performed. Brand funnel metrics tell you how the brand sits in people’s minds.
A brand health funnel is the brand funnel measured as part of a brand health study. The stage scores are read alongside metrics such as Mindshare, Brand Momentum, Brand Love and Net Promoter Score, which explain why people drop out at a given stage rather than only where they drop out.
A brand awareness funnel breaks the top stage into layers: top-of-mind, spontaneous and prompted awareness, followed by interest. It shows not only how many people know the brand but how strongly it comes to mind, which is what the Mindshare metric measures. It is the first thing we look at when awareness is high but sales are flat.
Two conversion rates. Awareness to interest shows whether the brand is relevant to the people who know it. Satisfaction to loyalty shows whether it is loved rather than merely liked. Awareness on its own is the least useful number on the page: it tells you how many people have heard of you, not how many want you.
Quarterly waves suit most brands, with monthly or continuous tracking for brands with heavy media spend or fast-moving categories. Annual measurement is too slow to connect a change in the funnel to the activity that caused it. Whatever the frequency, keep the questions, the sample and the method identical from wave to wave.
Enough to read the bottom of the funnel, not just the top. If 12% of a 500-person sample are loyal, that is 60 people, too few to compare segments with confidence. We size the sample from the smallest group you need to report on, so that segment and competitor funnels are readable, and we quote it with the study.
Yes. The brand pyramid is the same five stages drawn the other way up, with awareness as the wide base and loyalty at the peak. Some agencies use pyramid for the diagram and funnel for the analysis of movement between stages. At Vision One we use funnel for both, because the drop-off between stages is the point.
Yes. For a launch the funnel starts almost empty, and the early waves track how quickly awareness builds and whether it converts to trial. Reading the funnel at launch tells you whether the problem is reach or appeal, and our new product development research tests the concept before you spend on either.
The phrase is sometimes used for how the parts of a brand identity, the name, logo, colours and tone of voice, move people from recognition to preference. We measure that through the awareness and interest stages of the brand funnel, and test the identity itself with brand identity research.
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