Brand ownership workshop

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Question: Who owns the key drivers of purchase & loyalty in our market?

Key points

Understanding the key drivers of purchase & loyalty in a market is complex because many are emotional rather than rational, and consequently difficult to identify, analyse & measure.

Equally, while several brands may perform well against any given critical attribute, only one brand (if any) typically owns each one.

The workshop helps you work through these issues to decide how you can best position yourself competitively in your market place.

In more detail .......

We human beings are complicated.

We make logical decisions on two interacting levels: emotional and rational.

The emotional level holds the trump cards, and we often rationalise our decisions to make them acceptable to us. So, we do not steal those Post-it Notes from work, we deserve them for the extra few minutes we worked today.

Unfortunately, in social research, it is generally true that what can readily be measured rarely gets to the heart of the matter. The deeper our decision-making processes at an emotional level, the more their reality is hidden from us, and therefore the more obscure they are to any attempt to research them.

In multiple decision-maker environments (such as B2B) the processes are rationalised, but there are usually still many hidden agendas that drive the final outcome, such as the perceived preferences of top people and the actual prejudices of corporate standard-makers, not to mention corruption.

This is why suck it and see empirical testing is so important in marketing.

However, there are some generally acknowledged universals.

Social behaviourists (Pavlov, Watson, Skinner et al) have promoted the idea that we are driven by the desire to avoid/reduce pain and to seek pleasure. In branding terms, this means that we must trust things to work, and using the product/service should make us feel good about ourselves.

There is also a normative element, relating to what everyone else is doing. Is there a buzz? Is it endorsed? Is it fashionable?

Within our model, we called these Stature, Intimacy and Dynamics. If you have used our brand measurement templates, you will have come across these before.

These typically translate to some specific needs within each market, and each segment within a market.

The other key issue is that, for each segment, only one brand (or at most two) truly owns each attribute. Several brands may be quite good at them, but only one brand owns each one. So we can draw up lists of attributes for each brand and score them out (and we have tools to do that), or we can simply follow a discipline of applying each attribute to only one brand within each market segment.

This is what our brand ownership workshop does. It invites you to map out the strength of each brand overall within the market, and by segment, and then to analyse who owns each attribute in each segment. We strongly discourage joint ownership of an attribute.

Then you can decide what to do about it.

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