#65: Common Myths and Misconceptions with Brand Research

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the B2B Insights podcast. My name is Louise Coy, and I'm a research director at, ah, B2B International. And I'm joined today by my colleague Jennifer Strange, who's also a research director. Today we're going to be talking to you about the topic of brand research. Brand is one of the most popular types of research that we run, um, in a wide variety of industries all around the world. And we know from our proprietary superpowers research that brand is only becoming more important to business decisions. So today we're going to talk you through some of the most common misconceptions that we think exist about the subject of running brand research. So over to you, Jen, for myth number one.

Speaker B: Great. Thanks, Louise. So let's dive into myth one, which is that brand research is always going to be brand tracking research. I think before we get too far into this myth, it's probably a good idea to think about what we mean by brand tracking research. So when we're thinking of brand tracking research, we're thinking about research which tracks the brand awareness, usage, and also brand perceptions over time. I think it's quite common to think that brand research, um, is always going to be brand tracking because a lot of branding projects do involve an element of measuring and tracking over time. I do think that brand research can be so much more so. For example, there are different types of brand research that you can do that are not just aimed at measuring, but also aimed at really understanding certain areas of a brand. So for example, we've done lots of research into brand architecture for clients. And this is when we look at how a client's portfolio of brands work together. And I've also done some really interesting brand projects as well, where we've sought to understand whether newly acquired brands should be renamed or whether they should keep their original names and what impact the naming of the brand will have on sorts of the perceptions of that brand and also customers likelihood to purchase. I think as well, even if you are doing a typical brand tracking project, you can still mix things up and keep it fresh. And not just a standard tracking project. So, for example, you can do this by adding guest questions. So these questions might not be the standard questions that you have in every wave of your brand tracker. They might be questions that are interesting or new just for that year. So for example, they might focus on a particular theme or topic that our client is interested in. I know recently lots of clients have been wanting to dig into the environment, sustainability, and even perceptions of their thought leadership, um, with their customers. So this is something that you can do to really kind of widen that brand tracker and dig into additional topics to keep it a little bit more interesting and engaging. Great.

Speaker A: Thanks, Jen. And I think it's also really interesting to just include different audiences in your brand research. So it's really common to think that you should just go out and talk to the market to understand the awareness of your brand, but actually taking a more holistic approach. So, for example, also talking to employees or other stakeholders of the brand, understanding how career seekers would feel about taking on a role at your organization, talking even to industry experts, distributors, all of these different audiences can ensure you get a really well rounded 360 view of how your brand is perceived and also help you to understand any discrepancies there. So it might be the case that people who work for your organization see your brand in a certain way, which is actually very different from what you're putting out into the market. So now moving on to myth number two, which is that brand research should be quantitative. What we actually find in the world of B2B research is that often qualitative brand research can also add a lot of value in our cases. Often our audiences can be very niche. We can't necessarily always go after the sample sizes required for a robust quantitative project. So a qualitative project can give you the advantage of a lot of depth of insight into the audience and into the perceptions of your brand, and as I said, can work with smaller populations than might always be required for quant. Another option is to take a mixed method approach to brand research. So including that quantitative element which allows you to track and measure figures, and also combining that with the depth of insight that you can gain through qualitative research, this can be really valuable as it means you can understand some of the reasons behind the quantitative responses that you're seeing. It might be, for example, that perceptions of your brand on a particular metric have declined since the previous year. And, um, through including some qualitative interviews or qualitative questions, you can look to understand what some of the reasons might be behind that change.

Speaker B: I think as well, when you're doing qualitative brand research, it's important to think about the types of questions that you're going to include within the research, um, and what you want to actually achieve from these questions. So, for example, a technique that's really good to use in any qualitative research as well as brand research is a technique called laddering. So this can be used to really dig deeper into a, uh, topic and into the answers that your respondent is giving. So you're not just going to be taking their first response, but you're going to be asking them follow up questions on that, um, to really understand why something's important to them or understand why, why they have that particular perception of your brand. Another type of creative question that you can use, which works really well in branding projects, is to ask the person being interviewed to imagine that the brand is either an animal or a person. So if they're imagining the brand as an animal, they have to tell you what animal they think the brand would be. And if it was a person, you can ask them questions around what physical features does the brand as a person have, what characteristics does the brand as a person have? And uh, I suppose in both of these examples it's not necessarily the specific animal, the physical features that the person you're interviewing says that's the most important and interesting output, but it's really the sort of the different characteristics that the animal or the person might have that that's what's really interesting and can give you a really good insight into how they feel about the brand. So for example, if somebody says that your brand would be, um, a dog, for example, that can really bring up perceptions of your brand being loyal, being dependable, and that's what they think of when they think of the brand. I think including some creative question types in the research can really make the final results more engaging and memorable for the audience. So the audience you're presenting to might not remember that x percent of the market associated your brand with being loyal, but they're quite likely to remember the animal the brand was thought of after the research has finished.

Speaker A: Great. Thanks, Jen. I love that animal question. So now we've talked about a couple of the myths, but what we really always try to do at B2B International is to consider how to really elevate brand research to make sure that we're delivering the most impactful outcomes. Brand research really can be strategic and actionable and that is really all about making sure that we're extracting as much insight as possible from the numbers. And a lot of this comes down to the approach that we take to the analysis. We always try to avoid just showing lots of data, lots of slides within a report, but really focusing on the data that is most meaningful and is going to be most surprising and impactful to the client that we're working with. So for example, when it comes to the analysis approach, we can do things like measure what attributes are important from a brand. But we can also take this to the next level. We can do things like drivers analysis, leveraging correlation to understand the impact of some of these attributes on um, other areas of performance like overall satisfaction or likelihood to use a brand. We can also use advanced analytics to dig into things like the impact of renaming the brands. So if you were to rename one of the brands in your portfolio, you can actually measure what the likely impact of this would be on some of your key metrics.

Speaker B: I think as well there's also lots of different frameworks that you can use within a branding project. So we've used the brand health wheel quite a lot and this brings together metrics on brand awareness, brand perceptions and also brand performance to assess the overall health of a brand. And I found this framework in the past a really good one to use the branding projects, uh, as it's memorable and it brings a lot of different data points that you'll have within a brand project together into one point that can be compared and remembered year on year. Another great framework to use in branding projects is the ah, three Circles framework. So this framework focuses on how to create a winning brand positioning strategy. The framework looks at what customers need, it looks at the strengths of competitors and also the strength of our clients brand as well. So you can see where that white space is that might provide good opportunity to differentiate a brand from the other brands in the market. I think as well you're also, when you're trying to make brand research actionable, it's important to understand the market context from the beginning of the project so that you can relate any findings back to what's actually going on in the market at the moment. And this can be done during the kickoff workshop where it's really important that we get a good solid understanding of the business context and any brand challenges our client is facing. It's also really important as well to understand what the competition might be doing because obviously brands don't operate in isolation. It's really important to understand what else is going on in the market. And desk research can be a really good way of adding a bit more context to a, uh, branding project to really understand and make the, the insights that we get from branding projects more actionable.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker B: Thanks Jen.

Speaker A: So that brings us to the end of today's podcast. We hope that we've demonstrated that brand research doesn't just have to be about brand tracking and doesn't have to be quantitative, but actually can be very strategic and actionable in helping organizations determine the next steps for the their brand strategy. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. And to explore more of our content on how strategic research is used to inform successful business outcomes, or to subscribe to our B2B Insights newsletter, please visit B2B International's Insights Hub at, uh, b2binternational.com insights thank you.