Branding Market Research
What can Branding Market Research Do for My Business?
- Remembering the adage "perceptions are reality" branding research can help to align internal brand perceptions with those of the marketplace (BTW - they're almost always some significant differences between what employees think their brand means and those of the market)
- Understand how your brand compares to those of direct competitors on specific qualities or capabilities in the minds of customers. With a broadly written questionnaire this will probably help to illuminate some otherwise confusing market behaviors.
- Learn more about the expectations of customers with regard to product and service quality that are desired and how those expectations compare to what the marketplace is actually delivering (your company included). This can be a great opportunity for your company to capitalize on customers unmet needs.
- Understanding how your products and services are performing compared to the competitive set can dramatically change your advertising efforts to better match up with what customers perceive your strengths to be.
- Product development modifications are often changed to either dominate in an especially critical feature set that the competitive market is not sufficiently delivering. The flipside of that is when investments are reduced due to customer feedback that this category is not critical, or that another vendor has already claimed supremacy within that area.
What is Branding Market Research?
Brand marketing research process is typically aimed at 1) developing a thorough understanding of the target customers' perceptions of your company's brand as well as the other major competitors in the market, 2) identifying opportunities for building and leveraging the equity of the your brand, and 3) identifying areas where brand-building investment will achieve significant returns (is in harmony with the perceptions of your existing brand).
How Does Branding Market Research Work?
Branding market research is almost always a quantitative venture, at least initially. Generally there are a series of questions that ask the respondent to assess how different brands perform in a number of, what are believed to be key criteria, such as (quality, innovativeness, forward-looking, reliable, well engineered, attractive designs….). These scores are compared against the other brand(s) that were also included in the research and they are frequently graphed to visually display where brands exceed expectations and where they fall short. There are times when the quantitative data is a little bit to "flat" to really understand what the responses meant as they compared on brand to another, and in that case a small qualitative study may be commissioned to understand some of the more subtle details that separated the different brands.
