Brand proposition testing & tracking

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Question - how long does it take to get the information I need to radically improve my brand proposition?

Answer - 30 minutes in elapsed time, 5 minutes per customer. Using e-survey technology, you could publish a survey at 11:00 a.m., and have all the information you need, already analysed, by 11:30 a.m. - 30 minutes later. We know. We have done it!

Key points

Brand proposition testing and tracking is a critical input to the brand management process, and therefore to the growth and profitability of your brand.

In the age of e-surveys, you can usually complete this work for a good deal less than £1,000.

The leading-edge brand proposition testing and tracking tools will use a survey lasting no more than five minutes, and recognise three key realities:

1. people know what they like and dislike, but do not know what is important to them (so you need inferred/derived analyses of importance, using a simple methodology available in any spreadsheet package)
2. people make different decisions in different situations within the same product/service category (think of the type of car you would buy as a company car, versus what you might buy for private use)

3. each brand has its own drivers of purchase and loyalty. Brands are not judged against the same criteria

These issues are somewhat counter-intuitive, but obvious to anyone who handles brand research data.

The same 5-minute survey can give you all these answers:

1. what are the levels of “informed awareness” of your brands and rival brands (“informed awareness” is awareness to the extent that people can talk about you)?
2. how close do your target customers feel to you and to your rivals (intimacy)?
3. how much do they trust each of you (perceived quality)?
4. what share of wallet do you and your rivals command?
5. how loyal are they to you and to your rivals?
6. which of you has the most compelling proposition in that given situation?
7. do you know the issues that drive your, and rivals’, brand purchase and loyalty?
8. what are they?
9. how do you and rivals perform against each of these?
10. which propositions do you own?
11. which propositions do you need to own?
12. for each brand, is its pricing in-line and out-of-line with market expectations
13. for each brand, is its pricing in-line or out-of-line with that of competitive brands

This means that both testing your brand proposition, and those of rivals, and tracking them on a regular basis is cheap, easy and effective to do.

To view the survey tool, click here.

To learn more about the tool, contact us at enquiries@mudvalley.co.uk

In more detail………………

Developing a fresh, compelling, proposition that makes you stand out a mile from the competition, and that is targeted at specific people who are especially likely to want to buy your products and services, and who will give you the return on investment you need, is critical to brand success.

There are other things that are just as critical, such as developing high quality products and services, being in the right place at the right time, and making appropriate media investments - but if you do not get your brand proposition right, you had better have a stack of money.

Most people do not develop their brand propositions scientifically at all. They have a brainstorming session, and come to an agreement on what they think will be appealing to their customers (and not necessarily their best ones), and what they think they can deliver at a stretch.

If they were to analyse these propositions (and Mud Valley has just the tools to do this), they would find that their proposition is more or less the same as any other proposition in the market, and already delivered in high profile by the market leader (so they do not stand a chance).

Those who do analyse their brands using rigorous research methodologies will take a giant leap forward, because the results are rarely what they were expected to be – and the analysis is not that difficult and, in the age of e-surveys, rarely that expensive.

Having said that, there are three things, two of which will be instantly recognised by anybody handling this sort of data, that are both counter-intuitive and regularly over-looked.

The three things are:

1. people do not know what is important to them, so it is a waste of time asking them explicit self-stated importance questions, such as “How important to you is………? It doubles the length of the questionnaire, bores your customers, increases your bills, and provides you with absolutely misleading information. Importance has to be statistically derived/inferred, which is easily done in any spreadsheet package
2. people have different needs in different situations, indeed the same person is more different in different situations than are different people in the same situation. So you need to understand the different situations in which people buy your brand, and then research the drivers of purchase/loyalty within each of these situations
3. people do not apply the same importance rating to each brand – brands ask to be judged against different criteria, and they are.

The importance of inferred importance

Take the example of going to see a movie. Ask someone why they chose that particular movie, and they will tell you something relatively bland like “it’s really good”, or “I like those sorts of movies”. If you ask for stated importance scores, the scores will usually come out bunched.

Only by asking people to rate their expectations of the movie against a series of attributes, and their likelihood of seeing it, are you going to get a useful answer, by correlating the expected performance scores against the likelihood of seeing the movie.

The importance of the situation

Now, that is an overall view, but what happens if the sample movie-goers have decided to take someone they really want to sleep with, or the children, or their ageing, puritanical (but favourite) granny?

Fairly obviously, the choices are likely to be different according to the different situations.

The importance of each brand having different purchase drivers

Yet another stage on, assume that you love comedies and are indifferent to vampire movies. You have a choice between a mediocre comedy and a first-rate vampire movie. Which will you choose? Well, you are more likely to at least consider the vampire movie, not because it is funnier than the comedy, but because it is a better vampire movie than the other is a comedy.

Take another example. You are looking for a cheap flight. The low cost carrier, say Ryanair, is slightly cheaper than a premium one, but much more expensive than you expected or had hoped. In this situation, you might well decide to book the premium airline because you wish to punish the low cost operator for disappointing you. In other words, low cost as an issue is much more important for Ryanair than it is for the premium airline.

The Mud Valley challenge

By now we have probably lost you anyway, given that most marketers have a low tolerance of technical market research issues, but if you are still with us, here is the challenge.

It is not so easy to prove the difference in decision drivers by situation as you probably do not have the data, but you can easily prove the difference between self-stated importance and derived/inferred importance results, if you have:

1. some answers, by respondent, on how important certain attributes are to them
2. a rating, by each respondent, on how well you perform on each attribute
3. an overall rating for you, by respondent, on a desired outcome such as likelihood to purchase, share of wallet or attitudinal loyalty

And if you happen to have performance scores and overall ratings against desired outcomes for several brands, you can also prove that each brand has different drivers of purchase/loyalty.

Brand proposition tracking at an affordable price

The Mud Valley brand proposition tracking survey and analysis tool are designed to take these issues into account.

It is a very short survey, costing you £449 (+ incentives) via Mud Valley, and it will give you the answer to the following questions for any specific situation:

1. what are the levels of “informed awareness” of your brands and rival brands (“informed awareness” is awareness to the extent that people can talk about you)?
2. how close do your target customers feel to you and to your rivals (intimacy)?
3. how much do they trust each of you (perceived quality)?
4. what share of wallet do you and your rivals command?
5. how loyal are they to you and to your rivals?
6. which of you has the most compelling proposition in that given situation?
7. do you know the issues that drive your, and rivals’, brand purchase and loyalty?
8. what are they?
9. how do you and rivals perform against each of these?
10. which propositions do you own?
11. which propositions do you need to own?
12. for each brand, is its pricing in-line and out-of-line with market expectations
13. for each brand, is its pricing in-line or out-of-line with that of competitive brands

It may be somewhat surprising that you could know all this in a five-minute survey, costing £449 (+ incentives), and have the results back within an hour of publishing the survey – but it is true.

Such an exercise can put an end decisively to ten years of speculative discussion.

To view the survey tool, click here.

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