A brand is more than just a logo or a tagline. A brand encompasses everything an organization is, does, says, and believes. And strong brands are firmly rooted in consumer research.
Why? Strong brands should reflect the vision and values of an organization, but to truly foster growth, they must do so in a way that’s compelling to target customers and differentiated from competitors. That raises the questions: who should we be targeting, why, and how? That’s where consumer research comes in.
What is Consumer Research?
Consumer research, or market research with consumers, involves collecting and analyzing data related to consumers’ behaviors, preferences, motivations, experiences, and perceptions to inform business decision-making.
In the absence of consumer research, you’re left to make key brand, marketing, product, and experience decisions based on intuition and internal hypotheses. Conducting actual consumer research allows you to test hypotheses and collect valuable feedback before investing serious dollars in new campaigns, products, and experiences.
When it comes to branding, consumer research is a key component of brand strategy development.
Consumer Research & Brand Strategy
Campos regularly partners with organizations seeking to launch or refresh a brand strategy. A brand strategy outlines who your organization is going to target in order to grow, why you’re targeting them, and how you’re going to position your brand to resonate with them.
As such, in any brand strategy project, we collect insights in three areas:
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The company (or organization) itself: Who does our organization believe itself to be? What is our internal vision or identity? This identity is then consistently delivered through every touchpoint the brand has with customers and prospects.
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Consumers: Who are we targeting in order to grow? What are their needs, wants, and motivations as it relates to our category?
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Competitors: Who are we competing with? What makes us different or better?
How we collect these insights can vary (see below), but the intersection of these elements is what we call the brand’s “sweet spot”—that is, the starting point for developing an insights-backed brand strategy.
Company / Internal Insights
The question we are trying to answer in the internal-facing part of brand strategy is, who are we as a company? Why do we exist, and what do we believe? In other words, we’re trying to get at the brand’s purpose and values.
Brands that have a compelling purpose tend to inspire much greater devotion from their customers, and hence are more profitable. By contrast, brands that don’t know why they are doing what they’re doing will suffer from drift and scope creep and will not create a coherent, unified impression on people, making them less memorable and impactful.
So brand strategy starts—and ends—with organizational soul-searching. At Campos, we tend to gather information on the internal perspective on the brand at the beginning of a project, but also after we gather consumer insight and competitive insight, when we put it all together (more on that below).
Consumer Insights
In brand strategy, when it comes to the consumers, our goal is to determine who the brand should target for growth and to identify a core motivation (or motivations) that the brand can tap into to attract them and generate loyalty.
This motivation could be more on the functional side—say, for a laundry detergent brand, “I want to get my clothes clean.” But more ideally, we’re looking for a point of deep emotional resonance to tap into, as that’s more likely to elicit action. So, for a laundry detergent brand again, it might be like, “I want my clothes to look and smell clean so that I come across as well put-together to the people I encounter in my daily life.”
But before we can dig into wants, needs, and motivations, we first need to understand who the brand should be targeting. The primary tool for doing that is typically quantitative surveys, often a segmentation survey.
Market Segmentation
A segmentation survey, or market segmentation, is a quantitative tool used to break a market into distinct consumer segments. For example, rather than attempting to market to all moms, a brand should determine which type(s) of moms make the best targets for them and why.
To segment a market, we design a survey that includes demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and motivational questions. In the survey, we’re not only looking to gauge how respondents behave within the category, but also why they behave they way they do and who they are on a deeper level.
This survey is then fielded among a representative sample of that market. Once a large enough sample has been collected, our team runs a segmentation analysis to break respondents into smaller subgroups based on their responses to key survey questions. We then make recommendations for which segments to target within the market, based on data like the segment’s size and behaviors.
Segmentation allows you to move beyond one-size-fits-all messaging—and one-size-fits-all research. Once your target segments are defined, you can focus on gathering and analyzing data from your target segments specifically.
Competitive Insights
When developing a brand strategy, it’s also essential to collect competitive insights, since your brand will need to demonstrate (through both communications and experiences) how you are uniquely able to meet or exceed the needs or desires of customers.
The word “uniquely” is the key word here. If you have an amazing product that fulfills some deep emotional need for a specific target group of consumers, but there are 50 other companies out there also meeting the exact same need for the same group of people, then your brand strategy won’t work. The whole goal of this part of brand strategy is to figure out what your brand does that no other brand does in quite the same way.
Competitive insight can come from many different sources–sometimes we conduct a formal competitive analysis, or competitive audit, in which we analyze competitors’ marketing, web presence, offerings, etc., and identify “white space” for our client to occupy. Other times we solicit perceptions of competitors directly from consumers, through surveys or qualitative research.
Regardless of methodology, though, we’re striving to establish who we’re competing against (it’s not as simple as it sounds!) and what makes us unique compared to those competitors.
Expressing a Brand Strategy
Once Campos has collected company, consumer, and competitive insights, the real fun starts. This is when we develop the actual brand strategy. Often, we create several brand strategy options to consider and test with the target consumers.
Ultimately, a brand strategy is summarized with a few key elements, such as:
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Target consumers
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Positioning statement
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Personality
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Values
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Purpose
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Essence
Campos often delivers these and other strategy elements in the form of a “brand house.” This is a common visual framework for expressing a brand’s positioning and strategy to internal audiences (not to consumers). Basically, it’s a one-page cheat sheet representing that organization’s “DNA.” That said, it is also aspirational, and so might be somewhat different from the reality on the ground. It represents what the brand aspires to stand for in the hearts and minds of consumers.
Typically Campos uses all the insights it has gathered to produce 2-3 brand houses for a client to consider. Each of the brand houses is based on the research, so that all of them are authentic to the organization, informed by consumer needs, and differentiated from competition. Sometimes our client will simply select their most preferred, and we’ll work with them to refine and finalize it. Other times, they ask us to test elements of each brand house with consumers to ascertain which strategy would be most compelling.
Regardless, once finalized, the winning brand house should be provided to anyone who communicates about or on behalf of your brand, ensuring everything from your website to advertising collateral are coherent. If used correctly, the brand house should be what lies behind every marketing campaign, every communications effort, every website redesign—and even (in part) behind major decisions about new products you launch, what new strategies your company will implement, etc.
For some clients, Campos produces a Brand Strategy Playbook. This is a document that encapsulates the brand for internal audiences (and sometimes for external audiences, too). Essentially, it summarizes all the key insights and information from the brand strategy process into a manual for the brand, meant to be a continual reference guide for everyone who works on the brand (which in theory means everyone in the organization!).
Other Forms of Brand Research
There are many instances in which brand and marketing teams need to conduct brand research short of a full blown rebrand or brand refresh. Below are a few examples.
Brand Health Research
Brand health research, also known as brand tracking, describes the process for quantitatively monitoring key brand metrics like awareness, familiarity, and consideration on an ongoing basis. Typically you field the tracker among a sample that’s representative of your target customers. This allows you to understand the impact that marketing and advertising investments, as well as outside influences (e.g., news stories), have on your brand.
Typically brand health tracking surveys are fielded once or twice per year. The deliverables for these projects emphasize changes over time while putting those changes into the context of what might have driven the changes.
Campos typically also includes a competitive element in our tracking surveys, so we can monitor how perceptions of key competitors are changing, and we like to conduct a driver analysis on the data so we can understand which brand attributes are most important or influential with regard to key outcomes (e.g., consideration of purchasing the brand).
Qualitative research is often useful to supplement quantitative brand health tracking, either to inform the initial development of the survey instrument (e.g., to determine which competitors to include) or to dive deeper into themes surfaced in the tracker (e.g., changes in perceptions).
Customer Satisfaction
As previously mentioned, a brand is much more than a logo or tagline. It includes everything an organization is, does, says, and believes. So it’s not enough for your organization to merely communicate in a way that aligns with your brand strategy—your customer experience needs to be aligned with your strategy as well. Consumers will be disappointed if they interact with your brand and it doesn’t live up to their expectations based on what’s been communicated to them.
Customer satisfaction research is one way to keep a pulse on whether or not your customer experience is living up to the promise of your brand strategy. Typically collected on an ongoing or at least very regular basis, this type of customer feedback provides a quick snapshot of how satisfied people are with your brand overall and particular elements of its experience. Campos works with clients to break the experience into easy-to-assess components and then helps steer optimizations and improvements based on the feedback collected.
Customer satisfaction research is another area in which both quantitative and qualitative feedback is useful; often, qualitative research is needed to inform the design of a customer satisfaction survey or to better understand the insights identified in one.
Message Testing & Creative Testing
Before a brand makes a significant investment in new messaging or creative, they often conduct market research to gather feedback on those messages and/or creative elements in order to optimize them before going to market.
Campos has partnered with both agencies and end-clients to test everything from college admissions brochures to new bank logos to advertisements for grocery stores. We’ve conducted these tests in both quantitative and qualitative formats, and often we focus on soliciting feedback from target customers in particular (i.e., groups identified in previous segmentation research). Regardless, we always emphasize providing diagnostic feedback to those drafting the messaging or creating the collateral.
Ways Market Research Helps to Improve Branding
So, why should you conduct research to inform your branding? There are a few key reasons:
Customer-Centric Brands Win
Most brands find themselves in a crowded market with stiff competition, in one form or another. Consumers have no time or patience for brands whose value proposition, messaging, or products don’t resonate with them.
Brands that have a clear understanding of who they’re targeting and what those people want can create content, products, and experiences tailored specifically to those target customers. These people will be much more likely to connect with your brand and become loyal customers.
Avoid Costly Mistakes
Many brands find themselves scrambling to understand consumer perceptions only after a large, costly mistake, like a failed product launch or an ad campaign that accidentally offends many consumers.
Organizations can avoid these headaches (and these costs) by conducting market research before rolling out a new campaign, product, or service. Talk to your target customers and get feedback before you spend more money! Does this messaging resonate with them? How should it be optimized? Is this product meeting their needs? Does it work the way it should? These projects can vary widely depending on what’s being tested, but our priority is always preventing a mistake down the road for our clients.
How to Conduct Brand Market Research
Now that you have a clear understanding of why we conduct brand research, the question is how?
Every project Campos does is custom-built based on a client’s objectives, timeline, and budget. There’s no one right way to approach any of the brand-related projects we’ve described, but we typically deploy one or a combination of the following research methodologies:
Surveys
Quantitative research, or survey research, is essential for many brand projects. Whether we solicit responses via email, phone, or another methodology, surveys allow us to collect feedback and insights from a large sample of people. This allows us to validate hypotheses in a statistically significant way and conduct advanced analytic techniques, such as segmentation or driver analyses.
Focus Groups
Qualitative research, including focus groups, in-depth interviews, and dyads or triads, allow organizations to have deeper, more nuanced conversations with consumers, either in person or virtually.
Qualitative research is typically conducted by a trained moderator who designs a discussion guide to explore the “why’s” behind consumer behaviors and perceptions—without coming right out and asking why! The right qualitative methodology to use depends on whether the feedback sought out requires that respondents have the ability to speak with one another and build off of each other’s ideas.
Virtual Discussion Boards
Virtual discussion boards provide another opportunity to learn more about how consumers behave and interact with your brand. Typically these asynchronous engagements combine qualitative and quantitative elements and are moderated by a professional researcher who can probe for deeper insights as needed.
Ethnographic Research
By observing people in a “natural” environment (e.g., their home, or their local grocery store), we can learn more about people’s everyday lives and experiences and how those experiences intersect—or could intersect—with a given brand.
Partnering with Campos on Consumer Market Research
Given the amount of research you could do, it’s sometimes hard for organizations to identify what research they should do and why.
That’s where a partner like Campos comes in. We work with you to understand the current state of your brand and what you’re hoping to achieve—whether that’s a brand strategy refresh, testing a new ad campaign, exploring what customers think of a new product that’s being developed, or something else entirely.
We’ll use this as our guide to recommend a research methodology for you and clearly communicate what you’ll ultimately get out of the research and be able to do with it.
Want to discuss the possibilities? Reach out to us here.
