The Four Steps of Effective Brand Research

Quantitative and qualitative research are crucial tools for building a brand strategy. Discover the four steps to effective research that finds insightful data.

Connecting the dots between your quantitative and qualitative research is the biggest source for productive conversation and analysis. Try to keep your own personal assumptions out of your analysis and focus on what your team members, stakeholders and customers are saying. This can serve as a catalyst for your organization to make real change that speaks to your audience effectively and builds value for your company.

Then, there’s often a competitive analysis factor to your qualitative research. Try to gather an understanding of what the marketplace is doing and saying, and how other brands might be organizing their products, services, their value-added benefits, their claims, their warranties and their service/product promises. This will also influence the survey design that you’re going to put together for the quantitative side of your research later on.

Take Your Brand Research to New Heights

Below, we’ve outlined the importance of brand research as the foundation for an impactful strategy that captures attention and builds value for your company. Along the way, we also thoroughly review our recommended four-step brand research approach.

Customer engagement is the other side of this process, but don’t forget to talk to more people than just existing customers. What about past customers? What about lost customers? What’s a good customer? What’s a bad customer? What is their perspective going to be like? How do they think and talk about the brand? These questions will help provide insight into what your brand represents to different sectors of your audience, identify gaps, and likely provide opportunities for improvement.

The four steps below help lay a foundation of knowledge upon which you can build a more-informed brand strategy and methodology that speaks to your brand’s mission and the needs of your customers.

When analyzing, try to look at the data, take biases out and think about what the numbers say. For instance, “How does that number correlate to what we heard in interviews?” You need to be able to put that emotion with the factual information as it allows people to buy in. It allows people to truly feel invested in the work you’re doing.

Now it’s time to put your hypotheses and themes found in the previous two steps to the test. Surveys using the ideas you developed in step 2 allow you to see what customers prefer: do they respond better to a personable, down-to-earth brand voice, or do they prefer a more elevated, professional approach? The same kinds of tests can be run on visual brand identities, taglines, and brand names.

If the quantitative research indicates that your concepts and ideas are missing the mark, then you’ve learned early on that your findings are misaligned with broader trends. This could indicate an unintentional bias in your research, or show that it’s time to go back to the drawing board with a new concept that better captures your qualitative findings. Either way, you’ve saved yourself the trouble of finding this out after implementing the strategy, and can reset to find a better solution.

This step will begin to paint a broad picture of your brand from different perspectives. Remember: your brand exists as an idea in the minds of your employees, customers, competitors and onlookers. The qualitative research aims to understand that idea and begin to solidify issues, opportunities and recommendations that can be addressed in your brand and marketing strategy.

By using both, you can paint a more complete picture of the way people react and interact with your brand. Qualitative research provides a gut feel for what seems most important to your brand, while quantitative research tells you to what degree those things matter, allowing you to understand the depth and importance of the variables associated with your brand.

Start by taking a cross-section of your entire organization. Many organizations make the mistake of only interviewing the C-suite executives, but it’s crucial to interview employees from different departments, tiers, regions and branches. This is going to engage the organization and allow you to culturally align it. It also helps your interviewees buy into the brand because their voices are being heard, and helps you gather a healthy set of perspectives from the organization, top to bottom.

The Importance of Brand Research

With your qualitative research in hand, you can begin to distill your findings into test concepts. Think of them as a kind of hypothesis about your brand: “people react well to our messaging about X product/service,” or “people don’t believe our claims about our value proposition.” This gives you something to test when you begin your quantitative research.

Step #3: Quantitative Testing

If your goal is to determine a design direction for a rebrand, this stage might be where you think about a few creative updates to ask about during the quantitative research. That will give you testable ideas to learn how people respond and react.

When you have your test concepts ready, it’s time to move into quantitative testing.