Quest’s Heartbeat ™ is a powerful business & market research solution for correctly assessing & tracking your brand’s performance keeping in mind the ever changing market scenario in which they operate. Whilst sales levels and market share will always be the main sources of evaluating a brand’s performance, competitive activity such as special offers and promotions - not to mention seasonal factors, can often give a distorted picture.
An ongoing and accurate picture of Brand Health is a vital tool which allows Brand Managers and their colleagues to assess the effectiveness of their marketing programs to facilitate fine-tuning of marketing expenditure and to clearly pinpoint strategic issues facing their brand at any moment in time. We would suggest that keeping an up to date and historical analysis of Brand Health is a must on the desktop of every Brand Manager.
An ongoing and accurate picture of Brand Health is a vital tool which allows Brand Managers and their colleagues to assess the effectiveness of their marketing programs to facilitate fine-tuning of marketing expenditure and to clearly pinpoint strategic issues facing their brand at any moment in time. We would suggest that keeping an up to date and historical analysis of Brand Health is a must on the desktop of every Brand Manager.
Brand Health Indicators
These following measures are critical and very informative. Your brand’s indicators are compared in percentage terms with competitive brands to gauge how strong or weak they are in each respect. We can use this data to conduct gap analysis on the key measures:
o Awareness (top of mind, unprompted and prompted)
Top of mind awareness has been shown to be one of the most important indicators of brand health. This is especially important in the food and beverage sector as customers
are most likely to purchase the first brand that comes to mind. Awareness is, of course, the starting point in a virtuous circle that leads to trial and repeat purchase. We also measure Source of Awareness in order to understand how effective is your advertising and whether the brand is starting to generate the all-important word of mouth recommendations between friends and family.
o Trial
The conversion of awareness into trial is obviously essential in maintaining this virtuous circle. It helps us to understand how attractive the basic brand offer is in consumers’ minds. High awareness coupled with low trial rates may lead us to re-design communications to increase the appeal of the brand offer. We may also need to review distribution strategy if Heartbeat™ results indicate that consumers looked for it, but could not find it. Product sampling campaigns may be effective in also boosting trial rates.
o Repeat Purchase
The bedrock of every great brand is a loyal base of regular users. Great brands such as Tide, Pepsi and Nido have been extremely successful in this respect. High trial rates coupled with low repeat purchase levels would, however, indicate that the brand usage experience is not matching consumers’ expectations and indicate problems with product quality. This scenario requires a completely different marketing response. For a robust picture of Brand Health, we would hope to see continuously increasing levels of awareness, trial and repeat purchase emerging over time.
OTHER KEY MEASURES
o Frequency of Use Index
In any given category, the rate of product usage may vary greatly from one consumer to another. Naturally, acquiring heavy users is more lucrative than light users. Certain brands have already achieved such a high market share that it is unrealistic to expect further sizeable overall share gains to accrue. In such cases, increasing share amongst heavy users is a much more realistic option and Heartbeat™ tracks the success of your brand in this respect by indexing the split amongst types of users accordingly.
o Brand Loyalty
Naturally, we want our loyal users to love our brands and for the special bond that they have with the brand to get stronger over time. Heartbeat™ uses disposition scales to measure brand loyalty. The brand loyalty data provides indicators of how susceptible your customers are to overtures from competitive brands and, in turn, how susceptible their customers are to overtures from you which may highlight specific opportunities.
o Brand Personality
We take advantage of qualitative research, to develop brand image question batteries that pinpoint the image of your brand in consumers’ minds. In each case, the ratings are contrasted with the same ratings for competitive brands and gap analysis is again conducted. We also correlate brand image ratings against usership to gain insights into the image drivers for purchase. Brand image parameters may be either rational or emotional and also provide insights on whether your brand is perceived to deliver in performance terms and whether it has developed emotional benefits that may add value such as luxury or prestige. Saatchi & Saatchi have reminded us that “Lovemarks are super-developed brands that inspire loyalty beyond reason. The relationship Lovemarks have with the people who buy them is not built on function, but on emotion....and function.” Thus, we need to focus in on the brand personality.
o Brand Essence
There is much empirical evidence that the strongest brands succeed in the main because they have consistently etched a single image and association in consumers’ minds over many years. Since its original launch many years ago, Marlboro has used the cowboy as the main focus of its communication and now owns the association in the category with masculinity, freedom and adventure. In a similar way, Volvo has come to own Safety in the car category. Meanwhile, Mercedes which ‘owns’ luxury in the same market has received widespread criticism for launching cheaper versions which many argue have diluted the brand essence of luxury. Do you know what your brand essence is or should be?
o Price Awareness
One question that confronts Brand managers on a continuous basis is whether existing users would be willing to pay more for their brand. Whilst the optimum way to research this is by using Brand Price Trade Off modeling, this is often a costly exercise. Heartbeat™ provides clues as to whether this is a fertile line of further enquiry by asking consumers to specify how much they usually pay for their regular brand.
o Advertising Awareness and Message Recall
We can also compare the relationship that your brand has between those who are aware and unaware of your advertising. We can check awareness, source of awareness by media and perceptions of the message of the ads that were seen.
A Variable Component
We will also leave space in each wave for a few questions which we can change from wave to wave, depending on the particular interest at the time. This is a popular feature that can address the burning issue of the day, without needing to commission a separate study.
Heartbeat™ Costs
The actual costs of subscribing to this service depend upon the sample required which in turn depends upon the number of the genders, nationalities and ages involved. The fieldwork is divided into equal monthly quotas and moving annual totals are used to remove seasonality bias from the data.
Contact us to see how Brand Heartbeat™ can improve your brand's health.
Top of mind awareness has been shown to be one of the most important indicators of brand health. This is especially important in the food and beverage sector as customers
are most likely to purchase the first brand that comes to mind. Awareness is, of course, the starting point in a virtuous circle that leads to trial and repeat purchase. We also measure Source of Awareness in order to understand how effective is your advertising and whether the brand is starting to generate the all-important word of mouth recommendations between friends and family.
o Trial
The conversion of awareness into trial is obviously essential in maintaining this virtuous circle. It helps us to understand how attractive the basic brand offer is in consumers’ minds. High awareness coupled with low trial rates may lead us to re-design communications to increase the appeal of the brand offer. We may also need to review distribution strategy if Heartbeat™ results indicate that consumers looked for it, but could not find it. Product sampling campaigns may be effective in also boosting trial rates.
o Repeat Purchase
The bedrock of every great brand is a loyal base of regular users. Great brands such as Tide, Pepsi and Nido have been extremely successful in this respect. High trial rates coupled with low repeat purchase levels would, however, indicate that the brand usage experience is not matching consumers’ expectations and indicate problems with product quality. This scenario requires a completely different marketing response. For a robust picture of Brand Health, we would hope to see continuously increasing levels of awareness, trial and repeat purchase emerging over time.
OTHER KEY MEASURES
o Frequency of Use Index
In any given category, the rate of product usage may vary greatly from one consumer to another. Naturally, acquiring heavy users is more lucrative than light users. Certain brands have already achieved such a high market share that it is unrealistic to expect further sizeable overall share gains to accrue. In such cases, increasing share amongst heavy users is a much more realistic option and Heartbeat™ tracks the success of your brand in this respect by indexing the split amongst types of users accordingly.
o Brand Loyalty
Naturally, we want our loyal users to love our brands and for the special bond that they have with the brand to get stronger over time. Heartbeat™ uses disposition scales to measure brand loyalty. The brand loyalty data provides indicators of how susceptible your customers are to overtures from competitive brands and, in turn, how susceptible their customers are to overtures from you which may highlight specific opportunities.
o Brand Personality
We take advantage of qualitative research, to develop brand image question batteries that pinpoint the image of your brand in consumers’ minds. In each case, the ratings are contrasted with the same ratings for competitive brands and gap analysis is again conducted. We also correlate brand image ratings against usership to gain insights into the image drivers for purchase. Brand image parameters may be either rational or emotional and also provide insights on whether your brand is perceived to deliver in performance terms and whether it has developed emotional benefits that may add value such as luxury or prestige. Saatchi & Saatchi have reminded us that “Lovemarks are super-developed brands that inspire loyalty beyond reason. The relationship Lovemarks have with the people who buy them is not built on function, but on emotion....and function.” Thus, we need to focus in on the brand personality.
o Brand Essence
There is much empirical evidence that the strongest brands succeed in the main because they have consistently etched a single image and association in consumers’ minds over many years. Since its original launch many years ago, Marlboro has used the cowboy as the main focus of its communication and now owns the association in the category with masculinity, freedom and adventure. In a similar way, Volvo has come to own Safety in the car category. Meanwhile, Mercedes which ‘owns’ luxury in the same market has received widespread criticism for launching cheaper versions which many argue have diluted the brand essence of luxury. Do you know what your brand essence is or should be?
o Price Awareness
One question that confronts Brand managers on a continuous basis is whether existing users would be willing to pay more for their brand. Whilst the optimum way to research this is by using Brand Price Trade Off modeling, this is often a costly exercise. Heartbeat™ provides clues as to whether this is a fertile line of further enquiry by asking consumers to specify how much they usually pay for their regular brand.
o Advertising Awareness and Message Recall
We can also compare the relationship that your brand has between those who are aware and unaware of your advertising. We can check awareness, source of awareness by media and perceptions of the message of the ads that were seen.
A Variable Component
We will also leave space in each wave for a few questions which we can change from wave to wave, depending on the particular interest at the time. This is a popular feature that can address the burning issue of the day, without needing to commission a separate study.
Heartbeat™ Costs
The actual costs of subscribing to this service depend upon the sample required which in turn depends upon the number of the genders, nationalities and ages involved. The fieldwork is divided into equal monthly quotas and moving annual totals are used to remove seasonality bias from the data.
Contact us to see how Brand Heartbeat™ can improve your brand's health.
