How to create an awareness funnel

Several considerations will go into the construction of your awareness funnel and they start with an understanding of what data points your study and your client needs. It is a given that in addition to awareness we will also assess use, but do we also need to include brand consideration, evaluation, and past use? This will come down to your data needs but will be important factors in how we ultimately construct our funnel.

We can treat each data need as a building block in our construction. By taking this modular approach we can edit downstream if cuts need to be made because the study has changed or survey length is prompting a change. 

Building Blocks 

These are our building blocks. Please note there is a time component to use, we will have to define what is current vs lapsed and if needed we can break this out into different blocks by themselves. 

The next item to consider is our brand/vendor list. The length of the list will determine how we construction the funneling questions. Creating an exhaustive brand/vendor list can be a project unto itself. The reason the length of the brand/vendor list is important is that we always have to factor in survey fatigue. 

If we are including unaided awareness it will need to come first in the line of questioning. In this question, we present a few open text entry boxes and as the respondent some version of "what brands come to mind when you think of X". Where X is sports cars, denim jeans, blenders, or whatever space we are discussing. 

The first approach to the awareness/use question is a one-and-done matrix where we show all the brands/vendors and ask all the questions. If we have a brand/vendor list that is much longer than 10 entries a large matrix would present a very daunting challenge for your respondents. They would quickly get fatigued which leads to two big problems: 

•  Survey abandonment - they leave the survey never to return 
• Low-quality responses - they start randomly answering questions just to get the survey completed.  

Both are big issues; the latter is the bigger as there's no way to discern real data from low-quality.

The single matrix approach would look something like this: 

We can pick and choose the columns here to simplify our approach as needed for the study. As you can imagine if we are asking all of these questions for a long list of brands/vendors the respondent will easily get tired by the end of the matrix. To mitigate this issue we can take this next approach where we see more of the funnel shape to our questions. 

The respondent will multi-select the brands/vendors they are familiar with.

The respondent will multi-select the brands/vendors they have considered purchasing

The respondent will multi-select the brands/vendors they have evaluated 

The respondent will multi-select the brands/vendors they have used at any point in the past 

The respondent will multi-select the brands/vendors they are currently using 

The respondent will single select the brand/vendor they consider their primary one. 

In the funnel laid out above we can pick and choose the granularity we need by removing questions as long as we keep awareness at the top and use at the bottom, we can funnel gradually or jump straight from awareness to use. 

A common technique combines the above approaches where we first funnel for awareness with a multi-choices question then we take those selections into a matrix question where we ask about consideration, evaluation, and/or use. 

Thank you, we hope this discussion of awareness funneling techniques helps you in constructing your survey. If you have any questions please consult the Survey Directors assigned to your project.