I got a question about this via Twitter yesterday and after sounding off on the topic thought you might find it interesting. It is certainly relevant to Brand peletons because it expresses the simple truth that people don't choose an individual brand immediately but hold a shortlist in their heads. The construction, structure and use of this shortlist needs to fit with your promtional strategy. This is what I wrote.

The value of brand consideration as a measure (forgive me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here) is that consideration sets are portable and low risk - the customer doesn't have to commit and make up their mind (so is happy to talk about them without feeling they are being put on the spot. and they can be useful while you are researching a product (of the kind that takes a protracted search - cars being the classic example). So asking for baskets of brands is great because once a brand is in the basket it could be home and dry but if it isn't in the basket - then it ain't gonna happen.

Next is the spread in the repertoire. Funnily enough if the punter is looking for a car and say they want reliability they don't pick the 3 most reliable models - they will go for a spread of drivers to broaden out the choice - again part of the delaying process and to keep their options open - its is almost like a process of triangulation. Pick 3 high spec cars and its quite hard to choose between them - go for high spec vs comfort of ride etc and you have a fight on your hands. And the purpose of brand consideration is to help make decisions - not a rational process and not one of binary elimiation of branch after branch - humans don't optimise they excel in general problem solving. I got this from the Mental World of brands  book which has quite a lot of useful material on brand consideration and how this relates to brain structure - but don't ask me to quote chapter and verse.

Next is the hierarchy. Usually there is a hierarchy of my first option, second and so on. So if you have a basket of 4 brands you haven't got a 1 in 4 chance for each brand - they are arranged in a rough priority.  I tend to work on the basis of an exponential scale - like richter or decibels. The one which is the notional top ranked is twice as likely as the second which is twice as likely as the third. (This by the way is useful when trying to determine how likely your agency is to win a new business pitch. Use an exponential scale! Which is why big brands tend to make safe and reassuring noises and smaller ones go all out with a much more differentiated offer becaues they are so far behind they have everything to play for.  If there was an even chance the brands would behave very similarly but in reality the outsider is rewarded for breaking rules the market leader rarely so.

Using brand consideration thinking the job is less to get the sale than to get into the basket to begin with and to manoevre ones way to advantage inside the basket. The sale is the final putt - not the drive. By which time you should have done most of the important work.

I'm not sure how much of this is will be of use to you since it may be that you just want to look at brand consideration as a consumer issue to be researched and tracked whereas for me it is a live marketing issue. Marketers get your brand into the consideration basket. Don't just bang on about being the number one choice.

To answer your specific questions - different market sectors will have different levels of consideration because the length and complexity of  the purchase process and the size of the basket the customer is prepared to construct is going to be different. And moving it forward to advocacy is a whole new board game we'd have to talk about.  Because that is going to relate to the quality of the experience -  there is a feedback loop.

You mentioned the Reicheld measure -have you recommended this product. It is an interesting measure - its just that I don't believe that any 1 metric can tell you all you need to know. When I worked on Microsoft they used to use what they called a Burke score which was a composite of 3: would you recommend this product , are you happy with your purchase and would you repurchase which at least had the merit of a claimed behaviour.