How SME's can fight the enterprises
A recent McKinsey study showed that companies with strong brands outperformed their competitors by 20% in 2019, up from 14% 6 years earlier. Although the study was mainly done on large enterprises due to data accessibility, other research shows the same is true for smaller companies, if not even more.
“Most SME’s think brand building is not for them or that it’s too expensive, especially the research in the strategy phase,” explains Stef Hamerlinck, expert in branding and strategy for SME’s.”but building a strong brand strategy doesn’t require such large budgets anymore. Combining various research methods and using new metrics such as Share of Search make it significantly cheaper and more accessible to build a strategy and track the progress.”
The first step in building a strong brand is developing a strong brand strategy. This mainly includes consumer research such as data on the current brand position, the target audience and their perceptions. All that combined with market data such as market share or general and category trends. The past decades this was mainly done by expensive focus groups, extended surveys and market research, making good brand work something more exclusively for those companies with means.
“Today there are a lot more tools at our disposal that make it a lot more democratic, starting with search behavior.” continues Hamerlinck,”by looking at the Share of Search you can immediately see information such as brand position vs competition and it can be used as a proxy for market share. From there one can use tools such as Pollfish or just interview clients to get a deeper knowledge. It’s about finding the right mix.”
Share of Search has been proven to have a correlation to sales figures and market share, but even to high level survey data. As it is easily accessible and standardized around the globe, SME’s can use it even when they operate on a local or certain international level. The most important thing is that it can show historic trends to build hypothesis on, which can later on be investigated through other insights through social listening, focus groups or other ways.
Setting a solid strategy is only half the battle though. The same McKinsey study showed that the second and third key elements are consistency and strong delivery towards customers. This can only be achieved by also measuring one stays on track. Unfortunately, also here is where many companies fail, especially the bigger enterprises who believe to have already spent enough money on the research part.
“It’s like setting your goal to run the marathon in under 3h, but not measuring during the actual race whether you’re on schedule,” explains Stef. “You need to know not only whether you’re sticking to the strategy, but also if it’s actually doing the job. Brand tracking is important and also that is something where search data can come in handy.”
Besides the search trends on the brand, certain tools, such as MyTelescope also provide an overview of the search terms a brand is being associated with. Combined with sentiment analysis of social listening data, it can give some ideas of the attributes consumers associate your brand with as well as that of your competitors.
When we started with MyTelescope we were out to prove that brand building contributes significantly to the bottom line. At the same time we really wanted to democratise the data, looking for ways to even the playing field and enable predictions.”
Also here Share of Search can be of good help. The trends of Share of Search can be used to build trajectories on how market movements will evolve. Those brands overrepresented in Share of Search will take market share over time, research by MyTelescope has shown.
Fred Pirenne
Chief Science Officer
If you’re an SME who could need some sound advice, please contact Stef Hamerlinck.
Should you like the know more about MyTelescope, please don’ t hesitate to check out www.mytelescope.io