If your brand is considered a low-cost product to consumers, then you’re relying heavily on consumers returning to your brand time and time again. Purchase intent can help show you how likely this repurchasing is to happen, and is a key aspect of measuring brand health. In this article, we will look at why purchase intent is key to the aforementioned market, and see how easy it is to calculate.
Knowing your low-cost product relies heavily on constant repurchasing, means your brand must be at the forefront of a consumer’s mindset when considering options within a category. It could also be the case your product is something which can be considered to be an impulse purchase. If this is the case, then a brand with a high purchase intent score will often be the product of choice in these impulsive moments.
The positive side of having this reliance on constant repurchasing as a brand, is the fact that brand loyalty can develop very quickly, due to how frequent a purchase has to be made. This means if a purchase intent score stays high over a few quarters, it can be expected to carry on this trend indefinitely, unless there is a large alteration to the product and/or market it is based it in.
To calculate your companies purchase intent score, you must ask a group of people how likely they are to buy a brand. Around five prerequisite answers should be given, ranging from very unlikely to very likely. Then take the number of people who said very likely, and divide it by the total amount. What you are left with is your purchase intent score.
This information on its own is useful, but can be made more so by combining it with another way of measuring brand health, a net promoter score (NPS). This score shows how willing someone is to recommend a product. If both these scores are high, then it shows a very healthy brand. Yet, if one is high and the other is low it can highlight problems quickly. For example, if a brand has a high NPS but a low purchase intent score, then it shows people are happy with the product itself in its content, but are not willing to put their money where their mouth is. In a low-cost market, this might reveal a problem within pricing strategy, or brand awareness if it is more of an impulse buy.
