For many organizations, the most valuable asset is their brand. A brand typically makes a promise to the market, differentiates the organization from competitors, establishes relationships with customers and other stakeholders, and provides a guidepost for employees.
The advantages of a strong positive brand are many and can include:
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Shorter sales cycles
- Less customer churn
- Greater share of customer wallet
- Higher level of customer brand advocacy
- Ability to price products and services at a premium
- Better positioned to respond to negative events, news, etc.
Just as with your own physical health, it is good practice to continuously monitor the condition of your company or organizational brand. Some easy ways to accomplish this include:
- Conduct periodic informal interviews with customers and prospects
- Monitor online comments and reviews for your brand and key competitors
- Monitor news and industry coverage of your brand
- If you have physical locations, visit those and chat with customers
- If you use feedback tools like post-visit or post-transaction surveys, read the feedback
- Regularly field a short brand tracker survey that trends key questions such as brand awareness and brand preference
By monitoring your brand on a regular basis, you can spot issues early, detect trends relevant to your brand, and recognize changes in competitor brands that provide opportunities.
When does it make sense to conduct a more comprehensive brand research study?
We recommend this when:
- Introducing a new brand or considering a major brand refresh
- There are new competitors or alternatives for your product/service making an impact in the market
- Sales are trending downward for a year or more and can’t be explained
- Brand tracking activities indicate brand strength may have weakened
- Your industry has had major technological or distribution changes
- You are selling your business or acquiring/merging with another company
A more comprehensive brand study might include both qualitative and quantitative research, or it may use only one methodology depending on the industry and research goals. If you have the budget and time and you have not conducted a brand study in a while, it is usually best practice to start with qualitative research and then move to quantitative. This helps ensure you don’t make assumptions or miss asking a key question.
Brand research should dive deeper into various aspects of brand health, including top-of-mind and aided awareness, brand perceptions, brand consideration, brand preference, brand momentum, brand equity and brand loyalty. You might learn that you have good visibility in the market and are often in the consideration set, but a competitor is preferred more or prospects do not have a full understanding of your brand benefits. Or, you could discover that while you have enjoyed a strong brand position in the past, your brand is viewed by many as declining and brand loyalty is not strong.
The brand questions should be supplemented with a robust set of psychographic and demographic questions so you can understand what behaviors and attitudes are contributing to your brand results. Conducting datacuts will pinpoint how your brand fares among various sub-groups such as age, gender, or income level among consumers and occupation, education, or decision-making role among business professionals.
One occasionally overlooked reason to conduct a brand study is when there is an acquisition or merger, or when a company is preparing to sell. Providing data on your brand strength will assure buyers they are purchasing a solid company and help justify your asking price. In the case of mergers or acquisitions, there are often questions regarding which brands should be retained in the market and how the family of brands should be structured. Instead of letting corporate politics make those decisions, a better strategy is to gain reliable, current brand data from your market to guide any changes.
When conducting a major brand study, it can be helpful to work with an outside firm. In addition to having deep expertise with this type of research, an outside firm can be more objective when it comes to asking the right questions and evaluating the results. That can be hard to do for an internal team that has connections to the brand.
Linda Kuster is the president of Vernon Research Group.
