Earlier this week, we reviewed subconscious consumer associations across different alcohol categories including vodka, rum, tequila, whiskey, and cognac. Today, we’re going to take a deep dive into vodka, looking at what motivates a consumer to purchase one brand over the other. To do so, we ran a single and multiple implicit association test with 500 US consumers measuring the implicit association strength (IAS) to uncover how strongly consumers associate 71 characteristics and attributes towards a brand. Brands tracked include Grey Goose, Absolut, Smirnoff, Belvedere, and Titos.
The top emotional motivations underlying vodka are freedom and balance, while consumers do not align the category with status or prestige. Vodka over indexes on 'cheap', 'cocktails', 'fun', and 'hanging' out but comes up short on characteristics like 'authentic', 'sophisticated', and 'classic'.
Grey Goose, Smirnoff, and Tito’s have the highest amount of associations tied to their brand. In terms of brand performance, none of the brands are strongly linked to the main associations tied to the vodka category (except for Smirnoff who’s IAS for ‘cheap’ is more than double that of any other brand) uncovering many white spaces for brands to own into in an effort to strengthen their competitive advantage.
Among all brands, Tito’s has the highest association strength towards the attribute ‘trendy,’ but falls behind on ‘classic,’ and ‘old-fashioned.’ Absolut has the most balanced profile out of all of the brands, performing average on all emotion goals and resulting in an undifferentiated profile.
Unsurprisingly, both Grey Goose and Belvedere over-index on status as the main motivational driver for choosing the brand. However, the strongest characteristic associated with Belvedere is ‘overrated’ compared to Grey Goose who is highly aligned with ‘sophisticated.’ As a consumer profile, we see that Grey Goose significantly under indexes on ‘men,’ but is viewed as a drink for ‘family,’ ‘friends,’ and ‘women’
P.s. Vodka is the number one type of alcohol purchased by women. Smirnoff has the highest level of brand awareness (82 percent) while Grey Goose and Absolute have the highest purchase consideration in the category at 47 and 45 percent, respectfully.