Brand Research: 4 Tips for Measuring Your Brand

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away!”

With brand research, you provide your marketers and strategists with the vital vitamins that ensure your branding stays on course. After all, what good is marketing communication if it doesn’t lead to increased brand awareness, greater brand engagement, more preference, sales, and growth?

Blauw offers 4 tips for measuring your brand, so your organisation can start to grow:

• preferably measure implicitly, otherwise behaviour
• first conduct exploratory (outside-in) research (into CEPs and DBAs)
• don’t focus solely on short-term effects
• and look at (and measure) the complete picture

1. Measure the Unconscious

Researchers are increasingly discovering that human behaviour is largely unconsciously driven. Consumers are not as rational in their decision-making as we might think. The reason for choosing a product or service is often not so well-considered. It is much more often based on feeling and intuition. This is where the brand can make a difference.

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

To understand how the purchasing process works in your industry, you need to uncover this automatic, intuitive thinking. This is called implicit measurement. During this measurement method, respondents have less opportunity to reflect on their answers or actions. They react as primarily as possible: quickly, automatically, uninhibitedly.

You use this form of brand research when:

• You want to uncover the experience, atmosphere, and emotional associations with brand assets or communication messages
• You want to know what position your brand, product, or service occupies in the consumer’s mind, relative to the competition
• You want to move away from creative choices based on boardroom ‘gut-feel’ or assumptions about the consumer experience

If implicit measurement is not possible, then base your brand assessment on actual behaviour. For example, measure the perception of your brand by observing how people make choices, what triggers them, what steps they take or skip. This can be done with (exploratory) qualitative research.

2. First Exploratory Research, Then Testing

When you have worked for an organisation for a long time, you don’t always see the growth opportunities (or shortcomings) of the brand anymore. The brand’s heart beats, and you take that for granted. When you start a study with your own team or devise a new campaign, blind spots arise. Assumptions and ideas about what is happening in practice, among consumers.

By taking a step back at these moments, you look at your brand with fresh eyes again. That’s often where you find the eye-openers and opportunities to give the brand a boost.

What should you know beforehand?

Because the brain is primarily focused on efficiency and avoiding choice overload, and consumers are bombarded daily with thousands of commercial messages, your brand must be quickly recognisable and easily linked to specific situations. You activate brand recognition through strong and ‘distinctive brand assets’ (DBAs): brand elements such as colours and the font of your logo, but also, for example, a jingle or scent. Category entry points (CEPs) are the situations in which people should think of a brand, and ideally only your brand (4 pm and Cup-a-Soup, for example).

When you are measuring your brand or setting up a new campaign, you prefer not to make assumptions about your brand’s CEPs and DBAs. You can ‘collect’ these in an unbiased way from qualitative (preliminary) research: interviews or focus groups with customers and non-customers, or online communities around a specific industry or product group. Techniques such as topics, photo-sorting tasks, and storytelling gather ‘outside-in’ information. No assumptions or ‘gut-feel’ but rich, factual information about actual behaviour and its triggers. With exploratory research, you discover:

• what consumers are concerned with in daily life
• and you discover how you can respond to that
• which brands they know, notice, and buy
• how the entire process from thinking to purchase unfolds
• and what triggers there are to choose brand A, B, or C

Exploratory research is the starting point for quantitatively measuring your brand or creatively invigorating a campaign. Without including parameters that are irrelevant in practice.

3. Don’t Focus Solely on Short-Term Effects, Start Monitoring

There is an important distinction between your brand and marketing. Sales and marketing activities are often focused on short-term sales; a brand is not built in a few weeks. Just as an athlete must train for years to become stronger, better, faster, the brand’s heart of your organisation needs time to set the right course and to grow step by step.

The effects of sales campaigns are reflected much more quickly in revenue figures but are not always a predictor of long-term effects at the brand level. It takes time, for example, to establish CEPs and DBAs in a consumer’s memory. The stronger the link between CEPs and DBAs and the brand, the better your brand performs in the market. If you don’t also work on these more implicit connections with your brand alongside your sales activations, the effect of each activation will fade as soon as you stop. By combining short-term sales campaigns with long-term brand campaigns, you achieve the best results.

So, if you are going to measure your brand:

• determine a starting point for measurement
• preferably with good exploratory preliminary research
• derive the necessary insights for the creative brief from it, and
• then continuously measure what your branding yields

In short, monitor your brand.

4. Look at the Complete Picture

Preferably map your brand implicitly or through behaviour, conduct thorough exploratory research before taking steps to measure, and don’t focus solely on short-term effects. But what exactly should you measure? An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple: you will need to map the entire spectrum (if necessary, in stages).

The heart that keeps your organisation alive has multiple facets: blood, muscles, oxygen. Merely mapping brand awareness or preference is like a fizzy tablet replacing the many vitamins and raw materials the body needs. You’ll need more than just an apple.

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If brand research measures the health of your brand, then there are 3 building blocks you must measure and nurture: Salience, Affinity, and Performance.

Salience is the degree to which people think of your brand in relevant situations (i.e., ‘hooks’) supported by (audio)visual elements that act as a trigger for the brand. These category entry points (CEPs) and distinctive brand assets (DBAs) must be unique yet widely known, and strongly linked to your brand to be effective.

Affinity is the extent to which branding adds the right emotional value (and the right personality) to your products or services. This building block relates to the ’emotional component’ of the brand. Does the brand strike the right chord, does it attract or repel, and how does that compare to the competition?

Performance is the extent to which branding adds value to the brand and drives conversion in the brand funnel. This includes consideration and preference, but also the ease with which your brand can be purchased and found (in-store or online).