summary

The purpose of this study was to examine brand preferences towards three brands of vodka. Stolichnaya, Belvedere and Ketel One, were chosen due to their similar price points in the product category. Responses were gathered through an online survey that was distributed via email and posted on the Facebook website. 72 responses were received, of which 68 were complete and able to be used for the analysis conducted using the statistical software SPSS.

The attitude of the participants towards the brand and the ad were measured and analyzed through tests that included: basic frequency statistics, multiple regression, discriminant analysis, ANOVA, factor analysis and cluster analysis. All tests were completed at an alpha level of 0.15, therefore if a result is significant it can be predicted to the population with an 85% confidence level.

Overall the participants' showed a slight preference for Belvedere over Stolichnaya and Ketel One demonstrated through their Brand Index Score, which was significantly higher than the other two brands. Belvedere also had the greatest number of participants who felt more favorable toward the brand post-ad exposure with 34 participants, while they were less favorable to both Stolichnaya and Ketel One post-viewing. This would imply that Belvedere's ad was the most effective in this copy-testing study, as its mean score on the constant sum scale rose from 2.9 before viewing the ad to 3.5 after the ad. The attitude score that was calculated from the positive Likert items in the questionnaire resulted in scores for Ketel One and Belvedere that were almost equal, and a lower score for Stolichnaya. All attitude indicator scores were in the middle range indicating that people's attitudes were close to neutral and not strongly positive or negative.

This study is limited due mainly to the fact that the sample is small and not drawn from a random population. Time and resource limitations meant that this study also lacked a control group, which would have be beneficial for comparison purposes. More accurate comparisons could have possibly been drawn if a more comparable number of questions had been asked pre-ad exposure to those asked post-exposure.

Despite these limitations it was Belvedere that was most popular with participants, Ketel One was slightly behind and Stolichnaya had both the lowest mean Brand Index and Advertising Index Score.