Brand Research Topics

These are some of the areas of customer, brand and marketing research that I think could better inform brand management and marketing activities and decisions:

• Understand how well this generic four part segmentation scheme applies to a wide variety of product and service categories: (a) price conscious customers, (b) convenience oriented customers, (c) brand loyal customers, and (d) category enthusiasts who love to try new products and brands. Determine to what types of products and services this segmentation scheme mostly applies. 
• Identify the top few visual triggers for each of the top 100 brands. Include auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory triggers as applicable. 
• Determine the primary and secondary personas for people who prefer each automotive brand, make and model. 
• Understand what categories and brands are most effective in signaling social status within each social class. Categories to explore might include college/university affiliation, private club affiliation, religious affiliation, political party affiliation, city or town of residence, housing preferences, vacation preferences, hotel preferences, automobile preferences, hobbies, sports, musical preferences, food preferences, etc. Explore which brands across all categories are the most accurate and powerful indicators of social status. 
• Related to the previous bullet, identify the top 100 brands that serve as self-expressive badges. 
• Segment the US population by anxieties and fears. 
• Develop complete psychological profiles of each Democratic and Republican segment including attitudes, beliefs, values, hopes, anxieties and fears. Better yet, explore these segments independent of political party to identify organic groupings of voters.
• Identify price sensitivities across product and service categories for different customer segments.
• Determine the degree to which trustworthiness, consistency, reliability and dependability contribute to brand loyalty. 
• Determine the degree to which emotional versus rational appeals influence purchase decisions in different product and service categories. 
• Develop a brand loyalty scheme that considers whether and under what conditions (including scarcity and extreme price variance) people will substitute or switch to another brand versus waiting until they can purchase their fist choice brand.
• For different categories, determine what going upmarket or downmarket does to brand perceptions and loyalty for current customers. 
• Understand the categories in which aspirational brands can have the biggest impact.
• Understand what elements must be present for people to believe a brand's claim of social consciousness. 
• Understand the impact of brand message repetition on believability, quality perceptions, preference and sales. 
• Understand the effectiveness of reach versus frequency in generating incremental sales by product or service category. The incremental sales could come from current customers, new customers or both. 
• Explore the effectiveness of different types of humor used in different ways in brand advertising. 
• Identify the top 10 value-aligned brands in the world. Explore what values they embody and to what groups of people those values most appeal. 

Peeling Back the Onion

Sometimes, in brand research, one must continue to "peel back the onion" to better understand what the consumer is really saying. Recently, a client of mine (a heath care system) discovered that it was delivering well against convenience and accessibility. They discovered this through a quantitative brand equity measurement survey. Multiple data points pointed to this strength, including a variety of scaled response questions and some open-ended response questions. 

What they didn't discover, however, is what this actually means. For that, they will need to "peel back the onion" through further research. For instance, in their industry, accessibility could mean any of the following:

• Convenient locations
• Convenient hours
• Convenient parking, including uncrowded parking, valet parking or free parking
• 24/7 accessibility in a non-hospital setting
• A wide variety of payment options, including installment payments
• A wide variety of insurances accepted including Medicare and Medicaid
• Accepting patients who cannot pay
• Short wait times
• Immediate access to doctors
• Easy access to patient records
• 24/7 waiting or lobby areas
• Quality on-site food
• Easy admissions process
• Clear wayfinding
• Easy website navigation
• Handicap accessibility such as parking spaces, ramps and elevators
• Accommodations for deaf and blind people

If this client wants to tout (and even enhance) its accessibility, it needs to know how it is perceived to be accessible. A marketer is very lazy if he or she stops at the concept of accessibility without exploring what that actually means. How else can he or she talk about it properly on behalf of the brand and how else would he or she know to whom this might have the greatest appeal?

When conducting brand research dig deep enough to fully understand what the customer is telling you. This may require "peeling back the onion" in a number of steps.

The Ten Most Important Things to Know About Your Customers

Most marketers agree that market research and customer insights are very important to brand management and marketing strategy. This begs the question, "What are the most important things a marketer needs to know about his or her brand's customers?"

Here is my list of the ten most important questions a marketer needs to answer about his or her customers through research:

1. What needs (functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive) are fulfilled by products or services in your brand's product or service category?
2. Which of those needs are met by all brands and which are met by only a few or no brands?
3. Which product/service functions or features are critical and which are optional?
4. Who shops the category?
5. How can the category's customers be segmented? Which segments promise the greatest potential for  your brand?
6. What are the customer's unmet needs within your brand's product or service category?
7. What are his or her frustrations within the category?
8. Who or what does your customer listen to (website, expert, friend, periodical, trade show, etc.) to make decisions in your brand's product or service category?
9. Where is he or she most likely to go (distribution channels and specific stores) to find products or services like yours?
10. How sensitive is he or she to prices within the category? What are his or her expected prices and what are the maximum prices he or she would be willing to pay?

New Brands Require Research

We are occasionally approached by entrepreneurs or smaller businesses to help them figure out their brand, product or business model strategies. We are working with one such brand now. In these situations, often the entrepreneur creates a company, product or brand around personal intuition and insight. But maybe that entrepreneur or company is stumped about how to grow the brand. They are not sure in what direction they need to move next to take the brand to the next level. 

Usually, this is because they do not understand what it is about the product or brand that most appeals to the customer. They are not sure of its primary benefit, its purchase triggers or what sort of person is buying it and for what reason. Sometimes, the product or brand is so innovative that it is difficult for them to even articulate what category it is in. This lack of understanding makes it difficult to decide how to tweak the product or brand to take it to the next level. It also makes it difficult to understand in what ways the brand can be most successfully extended to generate additional sales. Sometimes, they need to drive down costs to make the product viable in the long run but they don't know which features they can eliminate without harming sales. At other times, they may not know how to convert impulse sales into repeat purchases. Some worry that their products or brand are primarily selling as a novelty and they are not quite sure about how to guarantee a lasting revenue stream. Sometimes the brand and the product work very well together. At other times, they are sending conflicting messages.

All of these problems can be solved through customer research that leads to customer insight. One must begin with deep qualitative research to uncover purchase motivations, brand perceptions and an understanding of what needs the brand fulfills in people's lives. This should also uncover how the brand makes people feel, when they feel compelled to purchase the brand and what are some of the brand's purchase triggers. The quality of qualitative research moderators varies hugely. Some merely sit at the end of a focus group table and ask questions, while others have a very large box of tools to stimulate deep insight. The latter are often more expensive, but they are almost always worth the extra investment. A lot of valuable insights can be garnered through well thought through deep qualitative research. This can then lead to quantitative research design. The quantitative research might be an attitude and usage study, a customer benefit segmentation study, a brand equity study (if their is high enough brand awareness) or a study that leads to customer targeting and volumetric forecasting. 

Here are the questions that need to be asked:

• Who is buying our products or brand?
• Why are they buying our products or brand?
• What triggers them to buy our products or brand?
• What can we do to get them to repeat their purchase of our products or brand?
• Are our products and brand congruent with one another or are they working against each other?
• What are the most viable paths for extending our brand to generate incremental sales?
• What is the essence of our brand?
• What deep needs does the brand fulfill?
• What does it promise to its customers and potential customers?
• Who are our brand's most viable customers?
• What are our brand's most promising customer need segments?

Taking your brand to the next level might require deeper customer insight. Research to uncover that insight can have a huge payoff if designed and conducted properly. 

Understanding the Customer

Brand naming, brand positioning, brand architecture, product design, package design, advertising campaigns - what do all of these and every other marketing component have in common? To be successful, they must be based on a deep understanding of the customer, including his beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears, desires and needs.

I continue to be surprised by how many of our clients lack this customer insight. They create new brands and sub-brands without it. They name brands without it. The create tag lines without it. They design products without it. They create new packaging without it. And they even develop new advertising campaigns without it.

Every organization should have resources and processes/mechanisms to gain deep customer insight. This could be in the form of consumer managers, marketing research professionals, salesforce feedback mechanisms, customer co-creation processes or something else.

Related to this is the belief that "our brand is for everyone," giving the marketer a "pass" on creating more focused marketing messages and campaigns. "We can't say anything in particular because our brand appeals to such a large cross-section of people."

Central to brands are their focus and targeting. This is what makes them relevant and compelling. Take the time to get to know your customers so that you are able to focus all that you do for greatest advantage based on their particular beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears, desires and needs.

I wish you every success with this.