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 much-needed vitamins -read insights- that ensure your branding is on track. Because what good are marketing communications if they don't increase brand awareness, engagement with the brand, preference, sales and growth?

Blauw offers 4 tips for measuring your brand so your organization can start growing:

• Preferably measures implicit and other behaviors
• Do exploratory (out-side in) research first (on CEPs and DBAs)
• don't stare blindly at short-term effects
• and look at (and meet) the complete picture‍

1. Measure the unconscious

Researchers are increasingly discovering that people's behavior is largely unconsciously driven. Consumers are not nearly as rational in making decisions as we think. The reason for choosing a product or service is often not as well-considered. It is much more often from feeling and intuition. That's where the brand can make the difference.

Implicit Association Test (IAT).

To find out how the buying process goes in your industry, you need to uncover this automatic, intuitive thinking. This is called implicit measurement. During this method of measurement, respondents have less opportunity to think about their answers or actions. They react as much as possible in a primary way: quickly, automatically, uninhibitedly.

You deploy this form of brand research when:

• You want to find out the perception, atmosphere and emotional associations with brand assets or communication messages
• You want to know what position your brand, product or service occupies in the minds of consumers, relative to competitors
• You want to get rid of creative choices based on boardroom "gut-feel," or assumptions about the consumer experience

If implicit measurement is not possible, start from actual behavior to map your brand. For example, measure the experience of your brand by looking at how people make choices, what reasons there are, which steps they take or skip. This can be done with (exploratory) qualitative research.

2. Exploratory research first, then testing

When you've been with an organization for some time, you don't always see the growth opportunities (or shortcomings) of the brand anymore. The brand heart beats and you take that for granted. When you and your own team launch a study or come up with a new campaign, blind spots appear. Assumptions and ideas about what is in the real world, among consumers.

By taking a step back at these times first, you look at your brand again with fresh eyes. There you often find the eye openers and opportunities to boost the brand again.

What should you know beforehand?

Because the brain is primarily focused on efficiency and avoiding choice stress - and consumers are bombarded daily with thousands of commercial messages - your brand must be quickly recognizable and easy to link to specific situations. Recognizing your brand is activated by strong anddistinctive brand assets (DBAs): brand elements such as colors 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 of your brand (4 o'clock and Cup-a-Soup, for example).

When you're in the process of measuring your brand or setting up a new campaign, you'd rather not make assumptions about your brand's CEPs and DBAs. You can 'retrieve' these un-biased from qualitative (preliminary) research: interviews or focus groups with customers and non-customers, or online communities around a specific industry or product group. Using techniques such as topics, photo-sorting assignments and storytelling, 'out-side in' information is retrieved. No assumptions or 'gut-feel' but rich, factual information about actual behavior and its triggers. With exploratory research, you find out:

• What consumers are doing in everyday life
• and discover how to respond to them
• which brands they know, they stand out, they buy
• How the whole process goes from thinking to buying
• and what triggers there are to choose brand A, B or C

Exploratory research is the starting point to start measuring your brand quantitatively or to breathe creative life into a campaign. Without including parameters that don't matter in practice.

3. Don't focus on short-term effects, start monitoring

There is an important difference between your brand and marketing. Sales and marketing campaigns are often focused on short-term sales; you don't build a brand in a few weeks. Just like an athlete has to train for years to get stronger, better, faster, the brand heart of your organization needs time to set the right course and grow step by step.

Effects of sales campaigns can be seen much faster in sales figures, but are not always a predictor of long-term effects at the brand level. It takes time to establish CEPs and DBAs in a consumer's memory, for example. The stronger the link between CEPs and DBAs and the brand; the better your brand scores in the marketplace. If you don't work on these more implicit connections to your brand in addition to your sales activations, the effect of each activation sinks in as soon as you stop it. By combining short-term sales campaigns with long-term brand campaigns, you will achieve the best results.

So if you are going to measure your brand:

• define a starting point to start measuring
• preferably with a good exploratory preliminary investigation
• draw from that the necessary insights for the creative briefing and
• then start measuring what your branding delivers on an ongoing basis

In short, start monitoring your brand.

4. Look at the complete picture

Preferably map your brand implicitly or through behavior, do good exploratory research before taking steps to measure, and don't stare blindly at short-term effects. But what exactly should you measure? An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Unfortunately, it is not that simple: you will have to map the entire spectrum (in steps if necessary).

The heart that keeps your organization alive has multiple facets: blood, muscle, oxygen. Merely mapping brand recognition or preference is like taking an effervescent tablet to replace 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 to measure and nurture: Salience, Affinity and Performance.

Salience is the degree to which people think of your brand in relevant situations (or "hooks") supported by (audio) visual elements that act as brand triggers. These category entry points (CEPs) and distinctive brand assets (DBAs) must be unique but widely known, and strongly linked to your brand or be effective.

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

Performance is the degree to which branding adds value to the brand and causes conversion in the brand funnel. This includes consideration and preference but also the ease with which you as a brand can be bought and found (in-store or online).

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