How to conduct stellar brand research.
Practical tips for brand research
When confronting the very basic question of "How to do we best conduct brand research?",
here are some useful ideas and approaches. Really, it's the basics of branding research, and brand understand in general. Yet, it is by covering the "basics" that can lead to stellar brand research results and insights.
1. Have a brand model in mind for your product category.
Having a brand model in mind means developing some assumptions and understanding of the role of brands. What is a brand? What makes a great brand? What are the components of brand. The idea of a model is not merely for academics or MBA students at Harvard or Berkeley to ponder and write papers about. Instead, a brand model is a simple way to represent your thinking and that of your colleagues in your company.
A brand model has these benefits:
- It gives you a checklist with which to monitor the health of your brand, and to build marketing plans.
- Provides a common language within your company
- A brand model facilitates collaboration among product and brand managers, and communication with CEO's and senior management.
- The components of your brand model -- the 'constructs' of how your customers perceive your brand -- deliver very specific guidance on the attributes that should be measured in research.
2 If you don't yet have a brand model, start with ours.
We've discussed our Great Brands Model elsewhere, but here's a summary.
There are five qualities that all great brands seem to have. They are:
1. Focus -- do a few things exceptionally well.
2. Contact -- maintain contact in multiple channels
3. Consistency -- Dependable, time after time.
4. Connection -- Connect with customers in a memorable way creating fans and advocates.
5. Leadership -- On some front or aspect, be known as the leader.
You might want to change these somewhat or wholesale, but after years of observing brands that are successful, and those that are not, these qualities continue to show up.
The final step in brand model building is to think about the parts or components of brand. The Power Decisions Group brand model has these components or levels of brand structure.
1. Value bundle : the tangible benefits delivered to customers;
2. Brand promise: this is the promise the brand makes to customers; it is how it connects to what customers need;
3. Brand picture: things we see such as products, logos, and ads
So, that's it, our Great Brands model. When we then look at the five qualites by the three components, we get a matrix of qualities -- and research attributes -- within each of the components. It is visualized like this...
3. Use your brand model to drive attributes for brand health measurement and tracking.
As you design brand research, or have your branding research firm do the design, then, use your brand model as a guidpost or checklist. The research design should translate the constructs of the model your company is on board with into research measurements. Using our Great Brands Model(tm), as an example, you might measure consistency of your Brand Picture (ads, marketing communications) in absolute terms in a survey, or over time in a tracking study, and use the same measurements both for your brand and your top competitiors.
You can see from this rather simple example, the power that a brand model has in driving research design. If you have a model in mind, your brand health (brand equity) research itself will be consistent, and your team will see the logic of the design because its based on a model that's had buy-in before you started.
Power Decisions Group
San Francisco USA
website: http://www.powerdecisions.com/inquire.cfm