17
brand research
Previous chapters touched upon research that can help with brand positioning and advertising. The next chapter covers brand equity research in depth. In this chapter, I highlight a number of other research techniques that can be helpful to the brand management process, beginning with brand asset research and followed by brand association measurement.
Brand Asset Research
Brand asset research is an important first step in brand extension. Brand asset research identifies and dimensionalizes a brand’s meaning to consumers, including its elasticity across product and service categories. It identifies categories within which consumers give the brand permission to operate. (More often than you might expect, consumers will indicate that a brand offers products in a category that it does not. This clearly identifies low-hanging—that is, brand extension—fruit.)
Typically, brand asset studies are conducted qualitatively (i.e., focus groups, minigroups, one-on-one interviews) using the following techniques: word association, qualitative mapping, ranking various brands between contrasting viewpoints, brand extendibility probes, and (often in a second phase) identifying the appeal of various concepts as they relate to the brand in question. I have found that the best way to communicate the result is by mapping the categories, concepts, and attributes as they relate to the core essence of the brand.
Think of a dartboard with the bull’s-eye being the brand’s core essence. The concepts that are closer to the bull’s-eye are less risky brand extension opportunities. The ones farther away risk diluting the brand’s essence and have a greater chance of failure (see Figure 17–1).
Brand Association Measurement1
It is important to measure associations both from and to the brand. (When I say “Lexus,” what comes to mind? What association do you get from the brand? When I say “luxury cars,” what comes to mind? You are drawn to a brand.) Qualitative research is an effective starting point if little is known. Specific qualitative techniques can be used to solicit associations. The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) and other projective techniques are covered later in this chapter.
Information gathered by qualitative research must be quantified to lay the groundwork for developing successful brand extension concepts. You should consider using both open-ended and scaled responses. Following are three approaches to quantifying brand associations:
1. Naming Method (open-ended). You present consumers with attributes. You then ask them to list the brands that come to mind. With this method, you can measure both the order and frequency of recall.
2. Latency Method (close-ended). You show consumers’ attributes (or category names) followed by brand names. The consumer answers yes or no for each brand, indicating whether it is associated with each attribute or product category. The computer records the time it took the consumer to respond for each answer. This is particularly effective with broader and more abstract category labels, such as “healthy foods,” “outdoor products,” or “products to help you manage your relationships.”
3. Scaled Questions. You can complement the two previous techniques with scaled questions, such as agree/disagree, or opposite pairs on statements regarding attributes, benefits, or personality. Include other brands to mask the brand in question. Choose brands that are key players in categories into which you are considering extending your brand.
Brand Extension Research: Final Steps
After the brand asset study is complete and you have measured brand associations, the next step in brand extension work typically is developing the most promising product concepts and then quantitatively screening them against the following criteria: need/need intensity, uniqueness, market gap/dissatisfaction with current alternatives, and purchase intent.
It is best when the results can be compared to a normative database for the brand and other companies in other industries. The final step, for those concepts that make it through the previous hurdles, is to create one or more test markets (taking the research in phases to reduce investment risk).
Successful brand extensions tend to have three characteristics:2
1. Perceptual Fit. The consumer must perceive the new item to be consistent with the parent brand.
2. Benefit Transfer. A benefit offered by the parent brand must be desired by consumers of products in the new category.
3. Competitive Leverage. The new items must stack up favorably to established items in the new category.
Therefore, an actionable, quantitative brand extension research test should incorporate all three components. In particular, incorporating the competitive set for each concept is critical. Consumers evaluate new products in the real world in a competitive context, so they need to do the same in a research test.
Other Useful Research Approaches
At a minimum, in order to understand how consumers perceive your brand, you need to probe in depth their first, most powerful, and most recent experiences with the brand. Following are some useful research approaches.
CUSTOMER SERVICE TESTING
Customer service has a huge impact on brand perceptions. Don’t take someone else’s word that it is working. As a brand marketer, you should test your customer service approaches at least a couple of times a year by testing online, telephone, and in-person customer and technical support (as applicable). Look for these things:
• How quickly and easily were you able to get your question answered or problem solved?
• Is customer service available 24/7?
• How long you were put on hold, if at all?
• How many steps did you have to go through to get your answer?
• Did you have to communicate the same information more than once (e.g., your name, account number, telephone number)?
• How friendly and helpful was the human interaction?
• Were you treated like an intelligent adult?
BRAND INUNDATION/DEPRIVATION TESTING
Do you want to better understand the benefits that your brand’s product or service delivers? Do you want to discover ways to increase use of your brand’s products and services? Try this: Identify a group of very light users and ask them to use your product or service as frequently as your heaviest users do for an extended period of time (at least through several usage cycles). Identify a group of heavy users and ask them to refrain from using your product or service for the same period of time. Ask the latter group to articulate what they used in lieu of your product or service to accomplish the same result. Ask both groups to keep a journal of their thoughts and feelings as they use or refrain from using your product or service. Follow up with in-depth, one-on-one interviews to better understand the role your brand’s products and services play in their lives. I guarantee you that this exercise will provide profound insight into the full potential for your brand’s products and services.
ARCHETYPE DISCOVERIES WORLDWIDE
This research company (www.archetypediscoveriesworldwide.com) was founded by Dr. G. C. Rapaille, the author of The Seven Secrets of Marketing. It offers an effective approach to uncovering the unspoken needs of the customer or employees, according to Procter & Gamble, which has commissioned more than thirty-two Archetype Discoveries over the years. In contrast to traditional marketing research firms, Archetype Discoveries does not rely on what people say. Instead these studies use a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology, psychology, and learning theories to discover the hidden cultural forces that preorganize the way people behave toward a product, service, or concept. Unlike opinions that can change in a minute, cultural archetypes are deeply imprinted in people’s minds and strongly rooted in cultural codes. If these “mental highways” and cultural forces change, it is at a glacial pace. The results form a permanent platform for marketing, new product design, innovation, and improvement of products or processes, and for more effective communication strategies. Therefore they are particularly useful for marketing managers, planners, product designers, change agents, advertisers, and public policy makers. Archetype Discoveries has conducted over 200 discoveries, in more than twenty countries, for such diverse products, services, and concepts as perfume, toys, cheese, security, quality improvement, nuclear power, automotives, credit cards, mergers, coffee, teenage pregnancy, and forests.
THE ZALTMAN METAPHOR ELICITATION TECHNIQUE
This interesting technique for discovering how consumers think about brands was developed by Jerry Zaltman of Harvard Business School and Robin Higie Coulter of the University of Connecticut. The technique is largely informed by “neuroscience, semiotics, and the ideas of Carl Jung.”3 ZMET combines neurobiology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and art theory to try to uncover the mental models that guide brand purchase behavior. This research recognizes that consumers can’t easily access or articulate the underlying motivations to their behaviors. They must be drawn out in other ways. It taps into unconscious thoughts that are believed to be largely visual. Study participants are asked to take photographs or collect pictures that say something about the brand in question. They return for one-on-one personal interviews that include storytelling, sorting the pictures into what will become mental maps, answering a series of probing questions, creating collages that summarize their thoughts, and creating a vignette that highlights important brand issues (among other possible exercises).
OTHER APPROACHES
Other approaches to better understanding consumer behavior include purchase diaries; spending time in participants’ homes with them; shopping with participants; asking participants to spend a few weeks collecting photographs of whatever they would like and later discussing the pictures in interviews; checking participants’ closets, pantries, and cabinets; and even analyzing their household trash. Another approach is to create detailed identities for each of your target consumers and role-play each one for a day, including shopping for or using products in your category. Much of this is ethnography: putting yourself in the consumers’ shoes by observing their brand shopping and usage patterns in real-life situations.
USING THE INTERNET
Most companies devote substantial marketing research resources to keeping in touch with their consumers. And yet the Internet provides for a 24/7 interaction with consumers through blogs, social media, and other online forums. Smart companies will embrace these methods to keep in close contact with their consumers. These mechanisms are superior to most traditional research methods in the following ways:
• They provide for ongoing interactive dialogue.
• They allow the company to become aware of and address issues as they emerge.
• They can become a mechanism for creating a stronger bond between the consumer and the company.
GUIDED IMAGERY
In the 1990s, if you to were to ask focus group participants what new features they would like to have integrated into their mobile telephones, do you think they would have said Internet access, e-mail, the ability to purchase music or identify products and their prices from UPC codes, GPS, voice-activated directions, or locating nearby restaurants or gas stations with the lowest gasoline prices? Marketers who are experienced in new product development know that you can’t just ask people about their latent needs and expect detailed visionary answers. However, guided imagery is a technique that allows you to help people imagine and experience ideal future states, uncovering many new product, service, and brand attributes and features. You do this by getting people to close their eyes and breath deeply, and once they are very relaxed and comfortable, you guide them through an ideal future state and help them to explore it with each of their senses. When they open their eyes, they write down everything that they experienced. The results can be profound.
PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES
Projective techniques overcome some of the limitations of direct questioning.4 Here is why:
• People are not always conscious of their underlying motivations.
• People tell you what they think you want to hear.
• People are sometimes embarrassed to admit their real motivations, thinking that divulging them would reflect negatively on them.
• Most people think of themselves as being completely rational in their decision making, so they discount or dismiss nonrational reasons for their behaviors.
• Some people fear how marketers might use the information “if they were to learn the truth about me,” and so they withhold that information to avoid being manipulated.
Projective techniques can help you better understand brand personality. For instance, consider this question: “If the brand was an animal/car/person/sports team/occupation, what animal/car/person/sports team/occupation would it be—and why?” A particularly powerful version of this question is “If this brand were a party, what kind of party would it be and why?” One can then probe on venue, music, food, drinks, people attending, what they are wearing and vehicles they drove to the party, providing deep insight into brand personality.
There are other projective research techniques that help you get below the surface. They include:
• Sentence completion
• Word association
• Consumer letters
• Brand time capsule
• Brand obituary/epitaph
• Brand press release/headline
• Brand sorting (on a wide variety of dimensions)
• Stereotypes
• Thought balloons
• Psychodrawing/modeling
• Role-playing and reenactment
I also have used the technique of providing participants with numerous pictures of a wide variety of people in a wide variety of settings. I then ask which of those people would buy, receive as a gift, and use the brand, and which wouldn’t. I then ask people to explain their answers.
Another technique explores perceived differences between brands. Ask people to sort products (competitors’ products and your products intermixed) into two piles—the “brand in question” and “not the brand in question.” (One version of this method disguises the brand mark; the other one doesn’t.) Once all the products have been sorted, probe why people thought the product either was or wasn’t the brand in question. (If this exercise is done in focus groups, ask participants to write their answers down first so that they are not biased by each other’s answers. Collect all of the answer sheets and compare the written responses to the group discussion.)
While at Hallmark, I worked with Dr. Sharon Livingston of The Livingston Group (http://www.tlgonline.com). She and Dr. Glenn Livingston have compiled a list of “43 of the most common emotional self statements” that are based on statistical analyses (factor analyses) of “emotional purchase motivation revealed in focus groups.” They have created a projective quantitative technique that:
• Rank orders the importance of the emotional drivers in your category
• Shows the direct link of features and functional benefits to the emotional drivers
• Graphically displays the position of your product or service, each of its features, your competition, the ideal company, and any additional advertising stimulus
• Assigns a single number to each product feature that represents the extent to which that feature is associated with all of the most important emotional benefits
You can learn more about this technique at http://www.tlgonline.com/sharon/articles/6.asp.
LOGO RESEARCH
When exploring new logo executions, the research may include any or all of the following components:
• Logo Imagery. Imagery evoked by various logo alternatives vs. that evoked by the current logo. (This exercise usually includes the intended brand personality attributes and attributes such as “boring.”)
• Logo Recognition. A “mock-up” of each variation of the logo is placed in its most likely usage environment (e.g., store marquis, product packaging) and then people at various distances are asked about what they see. This technique measures visibility, recognition, and the ability to break through visual clutter at various distances.
• Logo Recall. One at a time, different logo alternatives and the current logo are mixed in with other companies’ logos on a panel. People are allowed to view the panel for a few seconds. After that, the panel is covered or taken away and they must write down all of the brands that they remember seeing. Results are compared for each variation of the logo.
• Logo Preference. Each variation of the logo is featured on a card. People are given the deck of cards and asked to sort the logos/cards in order of preference. They are then asked to comment on why they ranked each logo variation the way they did.
OTHER RESEARCH TECHNIQUES
Sorting and Discussion. A technique to better understand brand price premium includes exposing different groups of participants to a wide variety of products and brands within the category in question, each time with your brand mark and your competitors’ brand marks applied to the products in different combinations. We compare the quality perceptions, associations, intent to purchase, and price that people would be willing to pay for the same products with different brand marks. A variation of this technique is to present the same products but without any brand marks, which highlights product (vs. brand) preference. Often, the first step of this exploration is to sort the products into stacks—for example, product “is brand A” or “is not brand A” or “is high quality” or “is not high quality,” etc.
Conjoint Analysis. Traditionally used for pricing research, conjoint analysis is very applicable for brand research as well. Respondents rate their buying intent for products comprised of various combinations of attributes (including product, service, sales terms, price, and brand attributes). Brand name is one of the attributes. Not only is this an excellent approach to measure the overall equity of your brand name vis-à-vis competitors, but it also allows you to measure the interactions/relationships of your brand name with other attributes. Simulation exercises also allow you to project the impact on share of preference for various attribute combinations (what-if exercises).
Corporate Image Tracking. An offshoot of brand image tracking, this technique measures changes in overall brand image on a variety of attributes. Its premise is that consumers have experiences with your company and brands in a variety of ways, and it is important to quantify the frequency and impact of those different experiences on the overall brand/corporate image.
For example, consumers interact with and experience the Hallmark name in many ways: shopping in Hallmark stores, buying and using Hallmark products, seeing television advertising, visiting the website, experiencing sponsorships and other public relations efforts, and viewing the Hallmark Channel on cable/satellite TV. A research-tracking program can measure the frequency of these various points of contact, as well as the satisfaction of those experiences and the subsequent impact on overall brand image.
Electronic Real-Time Research. ERT is qualitative research with some quantification of results. It is most often used for product research but is adaptable to brand research. (Dialsmith is one company that does ERT using its Perception Analyzer system.) ERT is used to:
• Get immediate quantitative feedback on specific benefits or concepts
• Be able to instantaneously see that feedback by any chosen segmentation of the respondents
• Be able to ask the respondents questions based upon that feedback (for additional insights)
Eye Tracking Research. Eye tracking research detects, records, and maps eye positions and movements. In this way, one can see what attracts a person’s attention, what the person dwells on, and how his attention flows through a web page, print ad, or other communication. It can be used to assist with web, package, advertising, and retail environment design.
Neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is a relatively new approach to marketing research that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroen-cephalography (EEG), and steady state topography (SST) to measure brain activity/response to specific stimuli, as well as other sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (e.g., biometrics such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and galvanic skin response) in response to the same. Using these approaches, researchers can measure visceral reactions such as excitement, anger, lust, and disgust.5
CBS, Frito-Lay, Google and other brands have used neuromarketing to better understand consumer response to their products and advertising. Political consultants are also starting to use this approach to identify voter reaction to specific messages. Some groups are concerned that this tool will give companies, politicians, and others too much control over people’s behaviors.
Big Data Analytics. This is the process of analyzing large amounts of unstructured or semistructured data of various types across different sources to identify patterns and correlations that could provide better targeting, additional revenue opportunities, and other competitive advantages. Some uses of big data include:6
• More in-depth and precise business understanding
• Improved customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns
• Optimized segmenting of customers
• Improved market trends and analysis
• Recognition and development of sales and market opportunities
• Improved planning and forecasting
Big data analytics is enabled primarily by substantially improved statistical and computational methods, but also by improved storage and computational capacity. Rather than constructing the experiments first, big data allows one to accumulate vast quantities of data and then identify statistically significant patterns.7 The largest challenge to big data analytics is an internal skills gap.
Big data can reveal unexpected correlations. My favorite is that the purchase of furniture coasters is a strong indicator of low credit risk and high credit scores.
Jason Frand of UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management provides these examples of how big data is being used today:8
One Midwest grocery chain used the data mining capacity of Oracle software to analyze local buying patterns. They discovered that when men bought diapers on Thursdays and Saturdays, they also tended to buy beer. Further analysis showed that these shoppers typically did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturdays. On Thursdays, however, they only bought a few items. The retailer concluded that they purchased the beer to have it available for the upcoming weekend. The grocery chain could use this newly discovered information in various ways to increase revenue. For example, they could move the beer display closer to the diaper display. And, they could make sure beer and diapers were sold at full price on Thursdays….
American Express can suggest products to its cardholders based on analysis of their monthly expenditures.
Wal-Mart is pioneering massive data mining to transform its supplier relationships. Wal-Mart captures point-of-sale transactions from over 2,900 stores in six countries and continuously transmits this data to its massive 7.5 terabyte Teradata data warehouse. Wal-Mart allows more than 3,500 suppliers to access data on their products and perform data analyses. These suppliers use this data to identify customer buying patterns at the store display level. They use this information to manage local store inventory and identify new merchandising opportunities. In 1995, Wal-Mart computers processed over 1 million complex data queries. In 2010, Wal-Mart processed 1 million customer transactions every hour feeding 2.5 petabyte databases.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is exploring a data mining application that can be used in conjunction with image recordings of basketball games. The Advanced Scout software analyzes the movements of players to help coaches orchestrate plays and strategies. For example, an analysis of the play-by-play sheet of the game played between the New York Knicks and the Cleveland Cavaliers on January 6, 1995, reveals that when Mark Price played the guard position, John Williams attempted four jump shots and made each one! Advanced Scout not only finds this pattern, but explains that it is interesting because it differs considerably from the average shooting percentage of 49.30 percent for the Cavaliers during that game.
As additional examples:
• Netflix mines its customer digital download database to recommend movies and shows that their customers may like, based on their viewing history.
• Xerox is developing social media analytics software to enable businesses to monitor their brand images. The software will be able to identify specific themes in social media content (tweets, blog posts, etc.) and route them to the appropriate internal people to handle.
Research Mandatories
To ensure that your research is actionable and provides the highest return on investment possible, the first step in any research project should be to define:
• Objectives (both business and research)
• Hypotheses
• Action standards
• A predetermined feedback loop to identify whether the actions resulted in the intended outcome
Use the checklist in Figure 17–2 to assess the efficacy of your brand management practices in the area covered by this chapter. The more questions to which you can answer “yes,” the better you are doing. The checklist also provides a brief summary of the material covered in the chapter.
Figure 17–2. Checklist: Brand research.