Consumers leave traces of key interest to managers on their journey to purchase. Next to traditional survey-based attitudes, readily available online metrics now show aggregate consumer actions. But how do survey response metrics and online action metrics relate to each other? To what extent do they explain and predict brand sales across consumer categories? This article shows that surveys and online behavior provide complementary information for brand managers. Times series data for 32 brands in 14 categories reveal low correlations but substantial dual causality between survey metrics and online actions. Combining both types of metrics greatly increases the model's power to explain and predict brand sales in low-involvement categories. By contrast, high-involvement categories do not gain much from adding survey-based attitudes to a model including online behavior metrics. The authors synthesize these generalizations in a new framework relating enduring attitudes to the contextual interest expressed by online actions. This new framework helps managers assess both types of metrics to drive brand performance depending on whether their goal is short-term sales or long-term brand health.

消费者在购买过程中会给经理留下重要兴趣的痕迹。除了传统的基于调查的态度外，现成的在线指标现在可以显示总体消费者行为。但是，调查响应指标和在线行动指标如何相互关联？他们在多大程度上解释和预测了跨消费者类别的品牌销售？本文显示调查和在线行为为品牌经理提供了补充信息。14个类别中32个品牌的时间序列数据显示出较低的相关性，但调查指标与在线行为之间存在巨大的双重因果关系。将这两种类型的指标结合起来，可以大大提高模型在低参与度类别中解释和预测品牌销售额的能力。相比之下，高参与度类别不会因将基于调查的态度添加到包括在线行为指标的模型中而获得太多收益。作者在一个新的框架中综合了这些概括，这些框架将持久的态度与在线行动所表达的上下文兴趣联系在一起。这个新框架可帮助经理根据目标是短期销售还是长期品牌健康来评估两种类型的指标，以提高品牌绩效。