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    Do older consumers purchase differently? : the effect of age on brand awareness, consideration, and purchase : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Mecredy, Philip
    The spending power of older consumers is rapidly rising as global populations continue to age. Yet, little is known about how ageing and its underlying mechanisms impact consumer behaviour. Without knowing whether the purchase patterns of older consumers differ from younger consumers, marketers may be unwisely neglecting or ineffectively targeting older consumers. Thus, across four studies, this thesis investigates whether, how, and why brand awareness, consideration, and purchase differ between older and younger consumers. This research finds that older and younger consumers display similar patterns of double jeopardy and brand duplication in their awareness and consideration of competing brands. Despite these similarities, an inverse-U shape is found for brand recognition and brand recall with the number of brands recognised and recalled increasing across age before slowing down and then declining. A similar inverse-U shape is found for brand consideration in subscription markets. For brand consideration and purchase sets in repertoire markets, a linear decline is initially found across age. However, when controlling for purchase rates to reflect changes in category purchasing, older consumers are aware of and consider more brands than younger consumers. Older consumers also show small increases in purchase loyalty across age groups for supermarket store choice and toothpaste, but not for fruit juice and pharmaceutical prescribing. These results provide the first conclusive evidence of age-related loyalty in some low-involvement categories, as loyalty measures used in prior studies are confounded by category purchase rates. While no loyalty differences were found across age groups for prescribing behaviour, longitudinal analysis reveals that physicians, regardless of age, become less reliant on their core armamentarium as they age and accumulate experience. Taken together, the research indicates that age-related loyalty patterns do sometimes occur, but cannot be explained by differences in awareness and consideration or the mechanisms that would affect these metrics (e.g. cognitive decline and biological ageing). Rather, the most likely explanation is that age-related effects are primarily driven by household lifecycle and accumulated experience. The findings provide strong implications on how to transition older consumers through the brand purchase funnel and outlines a blueprint for future studies of loyalty across age.
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    Can alternative metrics provide new insights from Net-Promoter data? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies in Marketing at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2016) Mecredy, Philip
    Marketers regularly use loyalty measures to better understand consumers’ purchase behaviour. In commercial market research the loyalty metric, Net Promoter Score (NPS), is commonly used due to its simplicity, and because there are claims that increases in NPS relate to increases in company revenue. However, the connection between NPS and revenue growth rates is widely criticised by scholars, casting doubt on the wisdom of implementing strategies that focus on increasing the numbers of highly loyal customers. This research considers whether alternative metrics, derived from Net-Promoter data, can provide new insights into customer loyalty. It examines whether the NPS, likelihood mean, and Polarization Index measure different aspects of loyalty in the real estate (n=1,818) and agricultural (n=2,785) sectors. It then evaluates the ability of the three measures to predict changes in same customer spend and company revenue using data from the agricultural sector. The findings show that the NPS and likelihood mean measure similar aspects of loyalty and that the Polarization Index measures a different aspect of loyalty when applied to 11-point Net-Promoter data. Longitudinal comparisons suggests that the NPS and likelihood mean are poor predictors of the current (t) and future (t+1) spend by the same customers, compared with the Polarization Index which provides a more accurate prediction. In contrast, the NPS and likelihood mean are found to have a strong relationship with current (t) and future (t+1) company revenue, while negative relationships were observed for the Polarization Index. These findings suggest that loyal customers increase their spending less than disloyal customers, as they have likely reached saturation point with the company’s products. However, loyal customers still contribute to company revenue growth by attracting new customers, presumably through Word-of-mouth (WOM). Therefore growth comes through penetration and increasing the amount spent by the least loyal customers, rather than through increasing spend by loyal customers.