Brand Research

Brand research focuses on understanding brand perceptions, brand positioning and the behaviour of the target consumer. Brand insights can then be used to develop an effective brand strategy, refine communication messages, identify new or stretch target audiences and improve the consumer experience of the brand.

Conducting on-going brand research ensures your business remains informed about changes in consumer preferences and market trends. You will be able to make decisions to drive brand growth and success that are grounded in genuine insight and consumer data.

Key reasons to conduct brand research include:

• To understand consumer perceptions of your brand, including awareness, attitudes and beliefs, e.g. McDonalds addressed negative consumer perceptions linked to fast food by introducing options for health conscious consumers.
• To identify areas for improvement, e.g. where is your brand underperforming, how can you improve your brand image? Apple is a classic example of a brand that turned itself around due to strategic innovation, product design, branding and marketing.
• To develop effective brand strategies, e.g. to develop advertising, messaging, and brand efforts that resonate with your target consumer. Think about how Nike has centred its brand strategy around the effective concept of ‘Just do it’, which resonates with the target audience’s desire to push through and achieve their goals.
• To stay ahead of your competitors. Your brand does not exist in a vacuum and brand performance can be strongly influenced by what your competitors are doing. Remember the impact on Blackberry of Apple and Samsung’s innovation in smartphones.
• To improve customer experience, thus leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Amazon’s introduction of one-click ordering streamlined the purchase process for customers, providing a painless ordering process compared to other online sites.

As with all our research, we design a custom-made research approach that is tailored to your needs and budget.

We may use one or several of the following:

• Focus Groups – these are sit-down discussions with pre-recruited groups of your consumers
• Digital Depth Interviews – these are one on one qualitative interviews conducted via WhatsApp with a small sample of consumers over the course of 3 days. They provide in-depth brand insight in a cost effective way, providing access to consumers over a range of geographies. They can be used for anything from advertising testing, concept testing, to more exploratory research into a category
• Immersions/Ethnography – this involves observing and speaking to your consumers in their natural environment (e.g. home, work, shopping, socialising) to gain first-hand experience of their world.
• Digital diaries – here individual consumers or a group of consumers share photos, videos, text and voice notes in relation to their product usage, usage occasions, etc. This is a great visual way to discover how consumers are engaging with your brand.
• Surveys – this quantitative approach can be conducted online, telephonically or face to face with a large sample of consumers in order to gather data on brand awareness, brand perceptions, brand equity, etc.
• Desk research – analysis of existing category data, e.g. market reports, industry reports, academic reports can be used to paint a broader picture of what is happening in your category providing the initial foundation for ad hoc research.
• Brand audit – this is a comprehensive review of a brand’s marketing, advertising or other communication to assess how well these align with the brand’s value, messaging and overall strategy.