Always On: Brand Tracking With Funnel Charts

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

Consumers are increasingly cost-conscious amid a volatile market, reshaping demand across categories and income tiers. We see this play out in a tendency towards affordability: More low-and middle-income consumers say they’re looking for the less expensive option when shopping. This trend has been steadily increasing since 2021.

Funnel charts provide a clear, visual representation of how consumers move through the different stages of engaging with a brand. They can also help identify points where there is huge audience drop-off. For example: If there is a big drop off in converting users into promoters, you may have an unhappy customer base or users who don’t see value in your product. Alternatively if a brand has high awareness but lower favorability and consideration, there’s work to be done to convert potential customers.

In this week’s Always On, we’re going to explore how funnels help a brand insights manager explore risks and reputation threats.

Going Deeper: How Funnels Help Identify Bottlenecks

Let’s start by comparing the funnels for two major airlines — Spirit Airlines and American Airlines.

Both brands have broad awareness in the market, but American Airlines does a much better job of converting aware consumers into favorable ones. While the brands have similar conversion rates into purchasing consideration, there are more consumers with favorable opinions of American Airlines.

It’s worth noting that, while these are both airlines, it’s not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. Spirit Airlines has historically been focused on low-cost tickets and seats, while American Airlines has a much larger fleet and more global reach.

The chart above looks at the funnel journey for all respondents, but Morning Consult gives you the capabilities to filter for certain audiences and explore those consumers’ journey down your brand funnel. For example, this is what the funnel looks like for American Airlines for frequent air travelers, which we define as people who fly at least twice a year.

The ability to explore this journey through the lens of specific audiences can help brands find growth opportunities amongst certain consumers or markets. Clients can explore funnel charts by selecting Funnel Chart as the chart type when making a new chart in dashboards.

Want access to try this yourself? Get in touch with us here.

Extra Credit

What drives consumers who are considering purchasing a product to change their mind? We explore that in a new report published on Morning Consult Pro earlier this month. The biggest cause: Affordability.

Home furnishings have the highest rate of abandonment, with nearly 40% of consumers dropping intended purchases due to factors like affordability and style uncertainty. Go deeper into this report to explore:

• The drivers of shopping journey abandonment
• How shopping abandonment plays out across different categories (beauty, clothing, etc.)
• The difference between online and in-store shoppers