Tutorial: Brand Research in Real Time
Up until now, brand research has been expensive, resulting in most companies only performing research maybe once a year.
But, in this post I will show you how you can conduct research and insights about your brand and market in a very simple, reliable and cost-effective way.
In this way you will avoid developing strategies based on assumptions about what your customers think, and instead use legitimate insights.
You will be able to use this solution to either do like SAAB, and cut your budget and working hours in half using it, or like Electrolux and identify PR opportunities and measure the marketing results. Or like 7-Eleven and Pressbyrån - draw key insights from big data to make smart decisions for the future.
This tutorial will show you how to make better strategic decisions for your brand by conducting brand research more efficiently & in real time, with the help of a tool called Competitive Compass.
Contents
What is brand research?
Simply put, brand research helps you monitor your brand’s health and competitiveness on the market.
It helps you identify threats and opportunities, as well as how customers align with your values, if they are likely to buy from your brand and the general interest for your brand.
We can summaries a brand research in a few questions:
How interested are people in your brand?
How is your brand perceived?
How likely are people to choose your brand?
What drives customers' choice of your brand?
What is your brand associated with?
Are people positive or negative towards your brand?
How is the brand positioned in relation to competition?
All this can then be summarised into answering one question that will help you know if you are on the right track or not: Is your brand doing well competitively?
Based on the research you then make business decisions.
Why is research important?
To be a successful marketer there are three main steps to follow (as advised by Mark Ritson):
1) Research
2) Strategy
3) Execution
Conducting brand research on a regular basis ensures you understand your brand from your customers’ perspective.
Which makes it easier to figure out how to make the right decisions.
It creates a possibility to measure the success of your strategies and operations, and you will have metrics that management will understand, helping you raise the money you need to make smarter investments in the right actions.
Here is an example used by Mark Ritson in Marketing Week on the P&G brand Febreze, on how Procter and Gamble’s Febreze reached an important milestone – $1bn (£810 million) in global sales and a place in P&G’s brand hall of fame. (Marketing Week, by Marketing Week Reporters 10 June 2019):
The old way of doing research
Brand research is something that has been seen as somewhat complicated and too large to implement on an ongoing basis, and has therefore not been carried out due to time and budget.
Until now, that has been the challenge. Resulting in most companies only performing research once a year - if they are lucky - but on average, once every third year.
So how can one understand the market and where the market is going if you don’t take the time to do the research?
Without the research, companies will inevitably end up developing strategies and operations based on assumptions - at best, someone will hopefully measure if it worked or not.
Normally what happens is that nobody does measure so the budget gets cut and you get fired.
That’s why we came up with the solution of “Competitive Compass”, to enable you to follow your key metrics and get a deeper understanding of the underlying facts in a fast and easy way.
The new way of doing research: Competitive Compass
If we want to be able to measure the success of our strategies and operations, compare ourselves with our competitors, and understand and learn how to beat them - we will need answers to the following three things:
We need a metric that gives us an overall view of our success and situation compared to our competitors. A metric similar to our sales numbers, but for our brand.
We need to understand why we are successful or unsuccessful.
We need to understand how to make better business decisions and stay ahead of our competitors.
To be able to answer those three things, we have during the last 5 years developed a new tool called “Competitive Compass”.
To use Competitive Compass is like doing research on a daily-basis and getting accurate information about your brand, in real time, without any extra work. You do not need to connect any data points, or make any surveys, or any of those other costly and time-consuming things.
Instead, this AI and Predictive analytics tool will do all the work for you. It collects perception data, behavioral data and macro trends, and combines the result into your own simple, easy-to-use dashboard.
You can read more about how we collect the data in this deep dive.
The tool will help you monitor your brand’s health and competitiveness, make it possible to measure the success of your actions, help you make better business decisions and stay ahead of your competitors.
At the moment, You can have Competitive Compass for free for 30 days (no credit card needed)
Competitive Compass simply answer our three things above and it answers those in three parts of the tool:
Brand Tracker:
Which tells how your brand is developing vs competition over time based on your competitiveness. Competitiveness is an index that tells if your company is doing well competitively. It is aggregated from 3 key data points: Interest, Consideration and attitude.
Hot Topics:
You get a view of which areas where your brand has the biggest potential to build its communication around, underlying topics within each area, as well as trending messages to use as a basis for building campaigns
Brand Positioning:
You get an understanding of which attributes are connected to their category and brand. You will also get a view on how the brand is positioned based on the attributes in relation to competition. This gives you a good overview of the opportunities to build a competitive position.
So how does this really work?
Let’s start by looking at the metric that gives us an overall view of our success and situation compared to our competitors, The Competitiveness.
Competitiveness – a pulse on your brand.
With the metric Competitiveness you can keep a pulse on your brand, at all time. This metric answers the question: How competitive is your company in its market?
You can follow it in real time, as well as select to see a wider overview in the span of a year or more.
Competitiveness measures the competitiveness of your business in relation to its competitors using an aggregation of three data points:
Interest: How interested people are in your brand. Measured using search volumes, Google Trends, as well as social and traditional online media mentions.
Consideration: How likely people are to choose your brand, and why. Based on surveys.
Attitude: An analysis of whether people are positive or negative towards your brand.
And you do not need to connect any data points or make any surveys, the tool will make all that for you.
Example on how Competitiveness works, and how to analyse the data:
Read more about The one Metric to rule them all.
So whether you are competitive or not is then dependent on the aforementioned different drivers which can be compartmentalized and analyzed individually.
Let’s have a look at them.
Analyse drivers individually in Brand Tracker
Attitude
Business Drivers
Attitude answers the question “What is the perception of your brand”. And is an analysis around whether people are positive or negative towards a brand. You will also be able to compare your result with competitors.
Business drivers then tells you why your brand is chosen by customers. It looks at six parameters that drive the brand and why customers choses your brand. This Marketing Mix Modelling is a proven technique to quantify the impact of marketing tactics or initiatives.
Example on how to use the Business drivers to optimize your business
You can also read the full example on How to apply the Marketing mix
Positioning:
The second part of the tool is Brand positioning which helps you understand perceptions around your brand and what attributes people associate with your brand.
Based on market perceptions and attributes, the data will highlight the market position that is available compared to your selected competitors.
All this data can then be filtered in 1, 2, 6 or 12 months periods – to understand how your positioning changes.
The insights then provide you with a deep understanding of current trends in the market and potential white spaces. Furthermore, how to position your brand to stand out from competitors through a well-defined niche positioning.
Example on how to use the how to use the Positioning tool:
You can also read the full example in our tutorial on How to use the Positioning tool in My Telescope Competitive Compass.
Find potential with Hot topics
The third part of the tool is called Hot topics, which gives you trending topics and themes in your category associated with your brand and your strongest marketing drivers at the moment.
First you will get to know key areas to focus on. The tool will analyse the current measurement of your marketing drivers in the market, and tell you what areas are most likely to boost the competitive edge for your brand.
Then you get to know what themes and topics are the ones that the market associates with your selected brand.
You can then use this data as a basis for building future campaigns.
Conclusion
Luckily, you don’t have to spend a fortune to gather the data you need to make a brand research, make better business decisions and stay ahead of your competitors.
We came up with My Telescope “Competitive Compass” to enable you to follow your key metrics and get a deeper understanding of the underlying facts in an easy and fast way.
If you want to know more about how the tool works you can easily book a personal demo here, or try the tool in action yourself. (no credit card required)