As mentioned, we follow two important academics in this. Keller, but also Byron Sharp, who attaches great value to mental and physical availability. Both are explained in this article . Physical availability is the same for every politician, because every eligible politician is on the ballot. It is therefore about mental availability at the moment of voting. That mental availability is the residue of all campaigns and media attention of months, if not years. The last few weeks no longer make a difference. Aided awareness is not a good predictor, because it does not measure whether people think of this politician during the elections.
That is why we choose to take top-of-mind awareness and spontaneous awareness as predictive variables (independent) and the number of seats as the outcome variable. Top-of-mind gets a factor of 11, the next one a factor of 10 and so on. This is how we weigh the strength of awareness. Based on polls at the time of our research, the ten largest parties would win 130 of the 150 seats. The calculation is then as follows:
Weighted top-of-mind and spontaneous awareness*130/100b= number of seats
The result can be seen below.
We see that the influence of familiarity on the hotel contact databasenumber of votes is underestimated by the polling agencies. They base their decision on what people say they are going to vote for and, for example, arrive at 27 seats for the VVD and 24 for the PVV. We base our decision on which politician comes to mind most easily when people are thinking about the elections in March. One forces people to think about who they are going to vote for (central processing of the message) and we base our decision on what they have in mind (peripheral processing). We will come back to this later.
We see that the parties SGP and CU, which we did not include for the sake of diversity, do indeed get seats and belong to the largest eleven. They had to move up a place due to the relatively great fame of Marianne Thieme, who gives the PvdD no less than 7 seats. If these predictions come true, then we have supporting evidence for proposition 1.
Proposition 2. The cliché is that unknown makes unloved, the opposite also appears to be true
That there is a connection between awareness and brand value has been known for a long time. For example, when we ask in lectures or workshops about the most valuable brands, people invariably mention Apple, Google, Coca Cola or Samsung. Not that they have made a calculation, it is correct. They are the first brands we think of. And with that there is a connection between awareness and commercial value.