Generating Brand Insights To Improve Business Performance
What Are Brand Insights And Analytics?
A brand refers to the feelings, thoughts, and recognition of a target audience on a company or product. Brand insight is an understanding of the brand’s particular identity, consumer perception, strengths and weaknesses, and competitiveness. Brand insights point to the overall performance of the brand and the customer pain points that need improvement for a company to grow.
Brand analytics, on the other hand, is the quantitative measure of all the feelings, thoughts, interactions, and recognitions from the target audience (customers) about a brand. These brand metrics are then collated to inform decisions that companies consider to strengthen brand insights, drive marketing, drive sales, and increase long-term profitability.
Brand Insights Guiding Business Data-Driven Decisions
Obtaining brand insights typically involves gathering current data (through surveys) about how customers interact with a brand in their customer journey and consequently how they view this brand. The data can also be gathered from a prospective target audience.
The insights from these surveys might include metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, customer effort scores (CES), net promoter scores (NPS), brand equity, share of voice (SOV), market share, purchase intent, brand sentiment/reputation, and brand recall (unprompted/prompted). Some of these metrics compute the overall brand health index of a company.
Gathering brand insights positions businesses better to create relevant services and offerings that meet their customers’ expectations. Brand insights are relevant for companies in achieving their business objectives – from tailoring their marketing campaigns, developing superior products and services, or improving the overall customer experience with their products and services, just to name but a few.
Businesses can rely on their brand insights to make data-driven decisions while developing new strategies or initiatives, with the assured knowledge that the insights are a true reflection of the opinions of actual or potential customers.
New businesses can rely on brand insights to create solid brand positioning while existing businesses can rely on brand insights to refine their positioning over time to stay relevant. Brand insights enable businesses to craft compelling marketing campaigns through the use of brand insights.
Businesses can leverage brand insights to develop new and innovative products. By pointing out specific pain points about a brand’s products/services, brand insights enable businesses to iterate on these pain points to develop better/superior products/services to satisfy consumer needs.
Brand insights also point to concrete; actionable ways businesses can improve their customer experience - leading to higher customer retention. Brand insights enable businesses to measure the overall brand performance and establish a competitive analysis.
In-depth Ways Businesses Implement Brand Insights To Improve Operations.
Brand positioning
New businesses can rely on brand insights to create solid brand positioning while existing businesses can rely on brand insights to refine their positioning over time to stay relevant. For instance, a supermarket that has historically not stocked alcoholic beverages in their stores.
Their brand insights from a recent market survey reveal that 80% of their customer base consumes alcoholic beverages. The supermarket considers these brand insights from their target audience to stock alcoholic beverages. This new positioning resonates well with the 80% of the customer base invoking in them a sense of loyalty and authenticity (thus reducing customer churn).
Marketing campaigns
Brands can craft compelling marketing campaigns through the use of brand insights. A utility company whose brand insights from a market survey show that some unscrupulous people pose as its agents/employees to harass and defraud its clients may use these insights to start a ‘Mulika Mwizi’ campaign or ‘Hakikisha’ campaign to create awareness among its customers on how to identify its genuine agents/employees.
Product development
Brand insights can point out specific pain points or wishes customers have about improving the brand's service or functionality. For example, consider a shampoo company that runs a brand insights study to capture metrics around brand satisfaction, brand associations, and more. The study shows that despite high satisfaction with their products, consumers strongly associate the brand with being ‘tropical’ - perhaps due to its signature coconut scent.
The brand’s demographics skew younger - likely to be more frequent travelers. Given the association with being tropical, and knowing that many of their customers are likely young, and on-the-go consumers, the brand begins the new product development process for travel-sized shampoo consumers can easily take with them to continue their routine away from home.
Customer experience
Brand insights point to concrete, actionable ways businesses can improve their customer experience - increasing customer retention. Consider a hotel chain that desires to get a pulse of their travelers' hospitality experience. The study includes findings around the hotel’s brand perception, customer service, and overall experience at their brand’s hotel locations.
The study finds that the majority of travelers are very happy with the hotel chain - especially the dining and accommodations, but 80% would be ‘very interested’ in having a digital room key card rather than a physical one, and 60% would prefer to check in via mobile app rather than the front desk. Their open-text feedback mentioned these features would create a more ‘modernized’ and ‘efficient’ hotel stay experience, so the hotel chain works on these new updates to offer their guests.
Competitive analysis
By understanding how consumers perceive their brand in comparison to competitor brands, businesses can identify key competitive advantages along with possible areas for improvement or new market opportunities. For instance, a brand insights study might leverage a Multi-Implicit Association Test (MIAT) to understand subconscious perceptions respondents have toward your brand and a variety of others in your category.
Key takeaways:
- Brand insights are critical to the success of product marketing strategies.
- Market research is an essential tool for understanding and shaping brand insights.
- Effective brand management requires a commitment to quality, innovation, and customer service.
At Reelanalytics, we are committed to providing strategic business insights. Improve business performance and transform data into actionable strategies, contact us at marketing@reelanalytics.net.