Market Research Training from Research Rockstar

What does your target market think of your brand?

How does your target market perceive your brand as compared to your competitors’ brands?

While brand research can be a very complex, exhaustive exercise, in many cases a simple approach may suffice. 

If you plan to do your own brand perception research using online surveys, here are some tips.

How your brand is perceived

For brand perceptions, a quick and easy way to collect data is to ask, “Which of the following words would you use to describe our company?” Then give them a list of varying words and allow them to pick up to three. It’s a simple format for the respondents, and gives you very useful insights.  Do people think of your brand as “smart” and “fun” or “stable” and “safe”? Are your competitors perceived as “friendly” and “creative” or “slow” and “boring”?

Other perceptions that we commonly seek to measure in research:

• This is a company that values its customers
• This is an innovative company
• This is a company that offers products or services that are a good value (or a good value for the dollar)

These types of brand questions are going to vary by product category and target market. B2B companies will have very different questions than B2C, and so on.

Brand Perception Research, Realistically

In an ideal world, a company would do very comprehensive brand perception research. But that type of time, and budget, is not always an option. With some careful planning, many companies can learn quite a lot from a short, online survey approach.

If you’d like to receive more free Market Research tips, click HERE to sign up for Research Rockstar’s Market Research Newsletter.

As the ancient proverb I just invented says, “Person with head buried in sand may well get kicked in butt.” So I’ve come up with a few scenarios that could result if online surveys with non-customer populations became impossible tomorrow. Imagine: you can still reach your customers for research, but what about the rest of the world? What if you could no longer reach qualified, non-customer groups in a quantitative way? If the lists and panels were no longer available or the response rates dropped to .0005 percent, what would the impact be on your market research needs and investments?

OPTION 1: GO QUAL.

Your quantitative research may simply be restricted to current customers. For non-customer populations, you’ll use observational or listening techniques like social media monitoring and ethnography, or qualitative techniques like focus groups and interviews. Recruiting for those qualitative methods will be hard, but finding 50 or 60 non-customers is easier than finding hundreds or more.

OPTION 2: GO TO THEM.

In-person surveys resurge. Intercept customers, at stores if you sell that way, through online shopping sites if not. If you’re in the B2B space, find non-customers at trade shows, conferences and other brand-neutral territories. Yes, it takes serious manpower, and there are limitations, but it works.

OPTION 3: TAP THE MIDDLE MAN.

Collecting feedback from your salespeople, outbound call center staff, and sales channels will become more critical than ever before. They may be your only conduit for reaching non-customer populations. Training these folks in how to ask questions (yes, really) and how to record feedback will be key.

OPTION 4: BRUTE FORCE.

You can try to force online surveys by using ad-based recruiting (survey ads posted to social media groups, banner ads on trade association sites, or ads in relevant online or print magazines). This is an expensive option, because response rates will be dismal….but better than nothing, you hope.

OPTION 5: BACK TO THE (PAPER) FUTURE.

There are plenty of lists available for postal mail—and if online surveys flounder, why not test it? We just may see a resurgence in paper-based surveys. The twist is that we may not have to mail actual surveys, just survey invitations.

OPTION 6: ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF GATHERING QUANTITATIVE DATA.

This will vary greatly by application. Here are two examples:

• For product concept testing, it may mean putting actual mock products on your web site with different configurations and price levels to test market response.
• For brand perception and awareness research, it could be posting one-question polls on social networking sites (like Facebook). Of course, such sites don’t gather perfect information about demographics. And how do we interpret poll results that lack precise geographic information? Still, it’s an option.

HAVE I MISSED ANY OTHERS?
I’d love your feedback. What do you think? If online surveys with non-customers became logistically impossible, what would your best option be? The future will belong to those with an arsenal of creative ideas ready to roll out.

[Have you seen the Research Rockstar paper on Market Research industry predictions? Get it here.]

In a crowded marketplace, how can market research help your company stand out? By doing things your competitors aren’t daring enough to try. So let’s have some fun.

ROMANCE ‘EM

Got a sample of something that you want your customers to try?  Samples can be great incentive items. Survey incentives are typically along the lines of a few bucks, a free magazine subscription, or reward points. Why not a free sample of Product X?

Caution: Product X, whether it is a breakfast cereal, a subscription of some sort, the first chapter of a book or some other freebie, must be a no-strings-attached gift. Anything else is called selling under the guise of research. Not cool.

Of course, using your own products as a survey incentive should only be done if it won’t skew the survey results. For example, offering a product sample as an incentive to a customer satisfaction survey isn’t a good idea; only people who like your company enough to want its products would respond.

GO TEAM

Who are your partners? Retail outlets, consultants, value-added resellers, manufacturers’ reps?  Maybe market research isn’t in their budget, but they sure would like to do some. Build in a partner incentive. Sponsor a survey and give them real estate, sort of a timeshare project. In exchange, you might have them promote the survey link to their customers (if suitable for the project) or you might simply do this to help them be successful selling your product. In the B‑to‑B world, you might go to your top ten channel partners and offer each the opportunity to submit three questions to a questionnaire. You may receive a few that overlap, but you can condense and organize the questions as needed, and voila—data that you and your channel partners find very helpful.

FOLLOW THAT THOUGHT (LEADER)

Who are the consultants, analysts, columnists, bloggers and podcasters that influence your customers? You might be surprised. You might also find that their information needs aren’t being met. What if they’re dissatisfied with the sources out there? Can you fill that void?  A nice, short survey can help you discover the thought leaders you should be engaging with, and which ones you can skip.

MAKE NEWS

Fresh research is excellent fodder for press releases (the media has a thing for pretty charts and graphs, especially when they come with a catchy hook), blogs, and podcasts. Conduct a sharp survey, and then bring in someone to interview about their take on the results. Maybe a consultant, a business partner; maybe your own CEO. Then package the results as a news release, podcast, blog posts, newsletter fodder or YouTube video. Do be careful, of course. There is always some skepticism about research sponsored by a company with a stake in the outcome, so be impeccable. Hire an outside firm (for objectivity), and keep your methods above reproach.

I feel for Market Research Managers in charge of Brand Awareness trackers. It’s not as easy as it used to be. As the number of means by which brand awareness and familiarity are influenced increases, our ability to measure their impact becomes more difficult. Sure, you can still efficiently measure absolute awareness levels, but how useful is that if you don’t know what is driving them?

In the old days, it was easy, especially in consumer markets (versus B2B). Once upon a time, consumers generally became aware of and purchased products the same ways. Brand awareness came largely from in-store displays, TV and print advertising. Purchasing via traditional retail. Yeah there were some variations…radio advertising was more effective with some groups than others, and in some markets catalogs were king.  But still, compared to the present, pretty simple.

Today, the means of brand exposure and familiarization are amazingly diverse and increasingly out of the brand’s control. Both consumer and B2B marketers have complexities in this regard.

Here is an example from a client I work with in the B2B space—and this is just one client’s situation! We identified their known brand awareness sources as follows:

1.    Banner ads
2.    Billboards (yes, actual billboards)
3.    Expert blogs (not brand-sponsored)
4.    Company website
5.    Company-sponsored ezine
6.    Direct Mail
7.    Direct sales force
8.    Direct-to-consumer news releases
9.    Employee twitters (sanctioned)
10.    Online and traditional retail channels (several)
11.    PR campaigns
12.    Print catalog
13.    Product review sites
14.    Trade magazine print ads
15.    Trade magazine sites (mentions in articles)
16.    Trade shows
17.    Word of Mouth

Sure, this client has some pretty sound hypotheses about which of these are more or less influential. But ideally they would be able to precisely answer the question: What’s the most efficient combination of brand building activities for maximizing awareness among desirable customer groups?

Brand Awareness Research Options: Let’s Keep an Open Mind

So what’s a beleaguered Market Research Manager to do? What are the options?

1.    Conduct a traditional quantitative study. That’s the best way to get the most data for really comprehensive analysis.  But it may not work if…you don’t have access to great lists of qualified respondents….you have a hard-to-reach target market…your budget doesn’t permit it…you’re in a fast-moving market where the results can change just as the analysis is being done…your internal clients will balk if you can’t reliably quantify each source of brand awareness.
2.    Run experiments. A great option but takes time. And again, if you are in a rapidly changing market, results may be too slow.
3.    Focus on competitive benchmarking. If you have 2 or more pretty direct competitors, one option is to design your research on a smaller scale and focus on competitive comparisons. You likely have Competitive Intelligence on your top competitors’ brand-building tactics (if not, you should!). So you can conduct some pretty straightforward research to deduce what works. “Brand C’s brand awareness is up 30% since last quarter and their only new efforts are around driving traffic to their website and a highly-focused print ad campaign!” (OK, that example is overly simplistic, but you get the point).
4.    Conduct qualitative research with newly acquired customers. I can see the quant researchers rolling their eyes, but this is an option that helps capture the complexities of influence while being very affordable compared to a quant effort.  Can people reliably self-report how they became aware or increasingly aware of a brand? Nope, and this is a challenge in quant as well. But they can share stories about specific brand-related exposures that can be very rich. For example, I once conducted a small set of such interviews for a client, and we heard a fascinating theme about new customers gaining brand awareness through one sales person’s rather unconventional methods. Very actionable stuff!

In any of these cases, we just have to remember that people cannot accurately self-report how they became aware of, or familiar with, a brand.  They can report what they do recall, but that is likely to be incomplete (they may remember a flashy TV ad, and simply not recall a series of banner ads). Some methods deal with this challenge better than others, and a market research agency with a track record in Brand Awareness will be able to advise you based on your market’s particular nuances.

Making A Plan

Hopefully the examples above illustrate that there are several ways of researching brand awareness drivers given different budget and time-line parameters. But the reality is, for many companies, no perfect solution exists that can absolutely quantify brand awareness drivers. The variables are just too complex, and changing too rapidly.

Still, even for Research Managers in complex markets, research can get us in the neighborhood, even if it won’t be perfect. For example, in working with a client in this situation, we were unable to create an absolute, quantified rank order of brand awareness drivers. But we were able to identify 4 tiers of drivers: A “Top” tier (the top 4 drivers), a “Strong” tier (the next 3), a “Low” tier (the next 4) and a “Wildcard” tier (items that appeared to be low but were difficult to measure).  Ideal? No. Actionable? Yes.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Market Research Managers with Brand Awareness projects is simply managing executive expectations.  Brand awareness measurement is a complex and moving target. And non-researchers often have unrealistic assumptions about how precise we can be—perhaps based on their previous experiences during simpler times. We need to re-set expectations with these folks, and inform them about more realistic outcomes. Heck, send them this article if it helps!

Any questions or comments? Please post them here or email me at KKorostoff@ResearchRockstar.com. Thanks!

[Thanks to Robin Brown at Environics Research Group for his feedback!]