The development of a brand perception instrument for South African youth

Abstract

South African youth are a diverse, multicultural heterogeneous cohort differentiated racially, spatially, digitally and socio-economically. This study aimed to develop a quantitative instrument to measure the brand perceptions of 18 to 24-year-old South African consumers communicated on Facebook. Young adults base their perceptions of brands on their touchpoints and other consumer experiences. Therefore, brands need to have a reliable means of measuring the brand perceptions of young adult consumers to avoid negative earned media and reputational damage. Ten factors that explained 62.812% of total variance were extracted after exploratory factor analysis. These factors are brand fan behaviour, shared brandrelated content, value brand influencers, corporate social responsiveness, user-generated content, brand-related content, familial influencers, premium brand influencers, communication expectations and recommending behaviour. Key findings indicate that measuring brand fan behaviour or interactions with brand advocates is critical to building positive perceptions and relationships with 18 to 24-year-old consumers on Facebook. Second, the shared brand-related content factor highlights the critical role brand experiences and customer opinion play on Facebook when shaping the perceptions about brands for young adults via positive and negative earned media.