Your brand is a tool, just like anything else. You can use it to build customer engagement and loyalty and, as a result, increase your sales. Brand research in this sense is a great way to make money. However, it’s not a short-term strategy. Investing in brand research is important and will help you increase your revenue, just not immediately. So, is it even worth the investment?
Different Types Of Brand Research & Their Importance
As with anything else, brand research can be separated into a few different types. Each branch of brand research provides different information about your brand and will help you make better decisions in the future. So, let’s go over the different types of brand research and why they’re important to your business.
Brand Awareness
If you want people to buy from your brand, they need to be aware that it exists. That’s the very first step in the buying process. Brand awareness is a crucial research type, because it helps you establish whether customers recognize your brand and what it’s best known for.
Brand Loyalty & Advocacy
The next type of brand research that’s very important is brand loyalty. It helps you understand whether customers keep coming back to you and why (high quality products, excellent customer service etc.). Brand loyalty is naturally connected to brand advocacy which measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to others. Both brand loyalty and advocacy are very important for any brand, but especially now, in times of uncertainty on the market, loyal customers can make or break a company.
Brand Perception
Brand perception is how customers and potential customers view your brand and what they think of it. It’s a very important thing to research because it directly affects brand loyalty and advocacy. This tool will also help you understand how well your brand is doing stacked against your competitors.
Brand Positioning
Another type of brand research is brand positioning. It helps you understand your place on the market and in the consumers’ minds. This is crucial for differentiating your brand from the rest and figuring out how to best communicate your offer to potential customers.
Brand Penetration
Brand penetration is sometimes referred to as brand popularity. It’s typically measured by the number of people who buy a specific brand or category of goods at least once in a certain time period, divided by the size of the relevant market. Once you have that number you need to multiply it by 100 to get a percentage of brand penetration which you can then compare to industry averages.
Will Brand Research Make You Money?
As a business owner or manager you’re always thinking about ROI. And that’s not only completely understandable, it’s also crucial when running a business. But many managers and owners don’t see the value in brand research and can’t integrate it properly into their strategy. That may be because a lot of the tools available today, like the NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, are rather outdated and don’t provide a complete overview of your brand on the market. However, you shouldn’t let that discourage you. Brand research is an excellent way to increase revenue through customer loyalty and better brand awareness. You will see a great ROI when it comes to brand research, it will just take some time. Shaping people’s perceptions and opinions is not easy and certainly won’t happen overnight. But in the long term it’s one of the best ways to ensure your brand’s success.
To sum up the above and answer our main question - yes, brand research will make you money. But it’s not a “get rich quick” scheme. And if anyone promises you super-quick returns on brand research, chances are - they are not truly experts in this field.
So, What To Do Next?
The first thing you should do is sit down with your internal marketing team and review the tools they use to track brand performance. It’s important to track and measure all the different types of metrics we mentioned above so that you have a complete overview of how your brand is doing on the market. The next step is to include branding in your long term strategy. You need to take care of your public image and consciously shape it in the minds of your customers by, for example, improving customer service or tweaking your user experience on the website.
This is the only way to make sure you get a great ROI on brand research and see actual increases in your revenue. If you’d like to talk to experts on branding - contact us and our team will help you set up a proper strategy for your brand.
