Brands represent promises. Are your brands keeping theirs?
Your brand encompasses every experience your customer has of you. Every interaction with your brand has the potential to foster customer trust and loyalty – or to erode it. Market research can help you assess and measure your brand health and your brand equity to assist you to make the most of one of your most important business assets.
The Market Intelligence Co. (TMIC) sees six main areas where research can contribute to brand management within any business:
- Brand awareness: including spontaneous awareness levels and compared to your key competitor brands.
- Brand distillation: offering clarity of brand essence and distilling its value proposition.
- Brand execution: assisting in the development and evaluation of communication strategies which promote your brand and convey your brand messages (eg. testing brand tag lines, logos, livery and brochures).
- Brand change: evaluating the potential impact of a proposed change to your brand (incl. brand livery, positioning, message and name).
- Brand alignment: assessing the alignment of your brand with your target market/audience.
- Brand performance: assessing the contribution of your brand to the business by measuring brand awareness, associations, usage, loyalty, satisfaction, competitive market positioning and key differentiation.
Brand research may involve qualitative, quantitative and hybrid (qual-quant) methods; research can be conducted as point in time research or event based, and/or tracking over time.
Your brand is one of your most important business assets, yet the true complexity of how your brand interacts with its environment is often misunderstood. Every individual has a different perception of your brand and this is influenced by a wide variety of attitudes, relationships and market forces. Positive brand equity takes time to build, and the perceptions of your brand are always changing. Successful brand management requires a precise understanding of the dynamics of decision making and user/purchaser behaviour in the unique context of your individual brand.
TMIC can help you to create or shape your brand promise to foster loyalty, retention, trust, advocacy, commitment, which will help you to enhance, grow and protect your brand so that you can achieve a positive return on your investment.