Intention to Purchase (ITP), or the equivalent of it, is a well-established brand metric, across many categories, to measure the consumers' intent to purchase a particular brand.

Researchers and marketers have established and demonstrated a strong co-relation between ITP and market share. As a result, ITP is now an important measure of marketing effectiveness and a lead indicator of likely market share and its movement.

However, actual market share is never equal to the ITP. The simple reason for the same is that ITP represents the intentions of only one of the parties involved in the transaction- the consumer. It assumes that the consumer will get the brand that he wants.

A brand sale can materialize only when the seller is also willing to sell the same brand that the consumer wants.

Purchase cannot happen without a seller (retailer). Anybody with exposure to channel sales would fully understand that the motives of the seller (a multi brand retailer) to promote a brand are very different from that of the consumer's motives to want that brand.

These motives drive a seller to convince and convert potential customers to his (seller's) choice of brands. This is no reason to believe that this would happen in the exclusive brand stores.

The seller's ability to convert varies depending on the category, his motives, and the consumer's insistence. In consumer durables, a category that I am very familiar with, brand conversion by retailers is as high as 60%.

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See the full article at http://pratapsingh.typepad.com/pratap_singh/2009/11/brand-metrics-are-you-measuring-its-.html

Pratap Singh,
Member of ADVBOUCLE's Marketing Consultants Network