Brand Research: A Marketing Research Solution for Branding

Have you been wondering what your brand’s position in the market is and the impression it gives to your target audience? Brand research, which can easily be conducted through online surveys nowadays, is a useful approach to investigate how consumers perceive the strengths of your company’s products or services and the results of its branding activities, which is essential for considering marketing and promotional strategies.

This series of articles about brand research will be divided into three parts. The first part explains types of brand research in detail and how it will help you solve your business challenges. The second part covers 5 methods of implementing brand research. Finally, as a hint of enhancing the effectiveness of brand research, the third part will provide useful frameworks for branding analysis.
 

Purpose of Conducting Brand Research

Brand research is the process of investigating how consumers perceive your company or brand. Before getting into the specific types of brand research, let us make the main purpose, which could be divided into the following major categories clear.

1. Understanding Your Company’s Position in the Market
Gain insights into whether your company has a differentiated image compared to competitors and whether your company’s value is appreciated. Understanding your current position helps you develop effective marketing strategies and can also assist in improving or developing existing or upcoming products.

2. Assessing the Current State of Your Company and Strategies
Understanding the current state of your product or service is useful for improving public relations, promotional, marketing, and other strategies. It helps you identify the current situation and areas for improvement, providing hints of the most appropriate actions.
 

Three Types of Brand Research 

Depending on the purpose, brand research can be divided into the following three types:

Furthermore, brand research can be conducted for both existing and new products.

1. Brand Awareness Survey

Brand awareness survey is conducted to determine how well your company’s products or services are recognized in the market or among consumers. This includes investigating whether people are aware of your brand, the channels through which they became aware, and the level of recall. It also helps you make quantitative decisions about the necessary marketing strategies to achieve your awareness goals at any given time.

Recall Rate is often used to measure brand awareness. There are two types of recall rates: unaided recall and aided recall.

• Unaided Recall

This measures the percentage of consumers who can recall your company’s products or services without being shown any prompts in a specific category. Brands that come to mind easily have a high unaided recall rate.

• Aided Recall

2. Brand Perception Survey 

Brand perception survey measures the impression of your product, service, or company brand by examining factors such as customer loyalty, evaluation, and overall perception. This clarifies the position of your brand in the market. The gap between the consumer perception of your brand and your intended brand image could also be identified.

There’s also a method known as category entry points, where you ask consumers about the brands that they come up with in a specific situation.

If you want to learn about your brand perception, it's essential to target those who are already aware of your brand. Design a survey focusing on their needs and level of satisfaction.

3. Brand Loyalty Survey

Brand loyalty survey measures consumers' attachment and loyalty to a brand by assessing factors such as familiarity, trust, respect, and sense of connection. If consumers have high brand loyalty, they are more likely to continue purchasing the product or service.
Two main metrics commonly used to measure brand loyalty are NPS® (Net Promoter Score®) and DWB (Definitely Would Buy).

NPS® (Net Promoter Score®, Customer Recommendation Score)
NPS® is an indicator that quantifies consumers’ attachment and trust towards a company, product, or service.

DWB (Definitely Would Buy)
DWB measures the purchase intention by assessing how likely consumers are to say they "definitely want to buy" the product or service.

Get ready for the next step

Feeling eager to start your own brand research? The next article about the five main methods of implementing brand research is bringing you to the next step. The pros and cons of each method will also be discussed.