Just happy little brands in the sky.
A brand is more than just awareness and recognition! Sometimes they just need to connect to people!
This month I am plugging the St. Louis chapter of the AMA. To become a member, you can visit https://amasaintlouis.org/.
SOURCES
Adapted from this list: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/basic-marketing-questions
https://www.ama.org/topics/brand-and-branding/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brand
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hey folks, welcome back! We’re talking about the top questions marketers ask, and today we’re going to delve into one that I spend a lot of time thinking about as a marketing research professional: How do customers perceive brands?
To understand that, we need to take a measurement of what that brand perception looks like.
To which I recommend taking a step back and asking… what is a brand?
I mean, sure, you can define a brand in terms of some different characteristics, like a logo or a trademark or a brand promise or positioning or advertising. But let’s not try to describe something by naming its external characteristics, because then our measurements are going to be off.
So, what is a brand?
Wikipedia’s definition is “A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller’s goods or service from those of other sellers.” But then it goes on to talk about the history of branding, which is about literally searing your logo into livestock, property or even enslaved human beings with a branding iron to provide proof of ownership. Ouch! And also, eww.
The American Marketing Association has a similar definition. “A brand is any distinctive feature like a name, term, design, or symbol that identifies goods or services.” Not surprising since it’s listed as a source for the Wikipedia article. But it then goes into talking about many different types of brand-related topics, like personal brands and corporate brands and brand equity and brand positioning. That’s better than talking about branding irons, but it’s still not nearly as concrete as we need things to be to take a measurement.
And the Merriam Webster dictionary defines multiple types of brands, but when it comes to marketing, it says, “a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer”, and also “a characteristic or distinctive kind” like “a lively brand of theater” and also “a public image, reputation, or identity conceived of as something to be marketed or promoted”.
How do you measure that?
Let me offer an analogy here. Say you want to measure how much sugar there is in a pastry scone you’re about to eat. Sounds easy, right? Just measure how much refined white sugar went into the recipe and divide by the portion size. Voila! You’ve got a sugar measurement. Except that scone also has flour in it, which is a carbohydrate – a macronutrient our bodies break down into sugar. Also, that scone has some fruit in it which, of course, means there’s going to be sugar from the fruit as well. Some of the flavorings used to make the scone taste nice might also have sugar in them. So, in order to get a total measurement of how much sugar is in our scone, we need to have a more holistic understanding of what “sugar” is, and we also need to understand the intent of the measurement.
Are we worried about how many calories the scone has? Are we worried about how healthy the scone is relative to other pastries? Or are we worried about how it’s going to impact people like diabetics with its glycemic load? These might sound like similar questions, but the applications are very different.
And that’s how we have to think about brand measurement as well, because the truth is, there’s not a consistent definition of what a brand is that all marketers understand, which means there’s also not a consistent set of measurements we all rely upon.
So, let’s talk about how you can measure brand perception – and what the applications of those measurements really are!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So I’m going to make a statement that I believe is true, and it’s this:
A brand is like a cloud.
We can see it from far away and understand it, but once we get inside it, things get really foggy and we really don’t understand what we’re seeing until we take a few steps back to understand it again.
If you can accept that what I’m saying is pretty close to the truth, then brand measurement is going to come easily to you. But if you are struggling to understand why brands are kind of a chaotic, confusing mess the closer you get to them, I’m going to give you some homework.
Go and talk to ten different people who interact with your favorite brand in different ways. Talk to some end-users, some people in the sales channel, some people who help create the products or services the brand carries, some people who manage the brand and some people who know little about the brand except that it exists.
You’re going to get at least 10 very different ideas of what that brand represents. And I say at least 10 because some of these individuals may have multiple ideas. But here’s the really wild part. The people with the most clarity will probably be those who express the least knowledge of the brand. They’ll recognize its most superficial elements.
The people who are the closest to the brand, though? They’ll tend to be the ones who offer the most complex understanding, particularly if you push them to get beyond taglines and talking points and speak about their own perceptions. They’ll often bring in a lot of personal connections and understandings that come from experience, and the longer their history with the brand, the more they’ll have to say.
It’s a fun exercise, but it also points to a real problem when it comes to measurement. If the people who know the brand the best tend to have the most nuanced understanding of it, how do you measure it?
This is why we need to think very careful about the intent behind our measurement.
Do we want to know if people are aware of our brand? That’s one set of measurements.
Do we want to know if people understand our brand? That’s another set.
Do we want to know if people like our brand? That’s another set too.
Do we want to know if people want to know more about our brand because of something we show them?
Or are likely to recommend it?
Or are thinking about switching to another brand from it?
I can keep going, but you get the picture. These are all really different questions with really different strategic implications. And all of these, I’d add, are pretty common applications of marketing research.
But let’s start with awareness, probably the most fundamental of all measurements. How do you measure brand awareness? You can ask people to name brands without any prompting, and we call that an unaided measure of awareness, but what does it mean if they name yours? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. It’s hard to say.
And if you give them a list to choose from and they select yours in what we call an aided measure, what does that mean? Again, it’s vague.
Neither of these measurements – unaided or aided – actually tells us anything more than whether or not a brand is familiar to the people we’re asking. Even if we also measure competing brands, we don’t know a lot.
And while it’s natural to think that a brand that’s familiar is also more successful, that’s not necessarily true. Familiar brands aren’t always desirable, and unfamiliar brands can be quite successful if they serve an appropriate niche.
So, we’ll generally pair an awareness measure with a different measure such as satisfaction, likeability – also known as affect – or likelihood to recommend – which could be expressed in a Net Promoter Score.
And this can tell us a little bit more about what our awareness measure means because we can now get some understanding about the person’s attitude towards our brand. We can compare them – how do people who like our brand fare in terms of awareness? How do people who don’t know our brand think about us in terms of affect? How aware are people who are dissatisfied with us of our competitors?
All of this has some good strategic implications. For that last group, we might even want to have a measure of switch intention – how likely are people to switch to a competitor, and do awareness and attitude have anything to do with that?
But you know what’s still missing here? An actual understanding of what the brand represents. And so we might include some adjectives that people can select to describe our brand to see what sticks, and we might also ask people to rate the believability of some statements that match our positioning or our internal brand documents to see if they ring true when our brand is mentioned.
Or, we might just ask them what they think, in their own words, and let them tell us. Though even then, we have to be careful, because how we ask the questions may influence how they answer them, and the depth and detail we’re looking for might not be present in the responses they give.
So, we might hold a focus group or a series of interviews to go deeper. Even then, we have to be careful, because people who are pressed to express things in those settings often exaggerate the importance of their own feelings, especially when they’re being paid to offer responses.
The people who are most qualified to talk about our brand are our own customers, but they also may not represent the general public. And the people who use competing brands may have no specific knowledge of ours or ability to explain why they don’t consider it.
This can lead to a measurement called “level of interest” or “likelihood to try” where we get people to express how likely they might be to try our brand given the right stimuli or messaging. But even then, aren’t we sort of influencing them to tell us what we want to hear? That measurement can be very contentious.
And so what we often wind up doing is a little bit of all of the above. We measure awareness and attitude and level of interest and brand attribute matching and competitive landscape and maybe even recall of messaging or resonance of positioning.
I often recommend both qualitative and quantitative research if you want to do it right, and it can be a big, costly exercise if you want repeat measurements because the sample sizes required are usually in the hundreds or even the thousands.
And often, the clarity that comes from this research is… well, it’s kind of like walking into a cloud. You have to step away and look at it from a distance to really make any sense out of it.
Because brands are complicated.
But let me offer this solution. The best brands don’t need to be concretely understood. They simply need to be a hook into something that the average person can understand.
Think about Apple. It’s a brand that represents, for most people, really reliable and well-made consumer electronics. Most people don’t need to know more than that to consider an Apple product. The brand stands for something precise enough that it’s understandable, but vague enough that it’s just easier to say “Apple.”
Think about Starbucks. It’s a brand that represents, for most people, coffee. And yet Starbucks offers so much more than just coffee on its menu, and also, you can get coffee just about anywhere. So Starbucks isn’t really about coffee – it’s about a particular experience of buying coffee. The brand again stands for something precise enough that’s understandable, but vague enough that it’s just easier to say “Starbucks.”
Think about Nike. It’s brand that represents, for most people, athletic shoes. And yet Nike positions itself as a lifestyle brand that is about more than utility or fashion – it’s about the competitive nature of sports, the work that goes into being the best at something, the high that comes with performing above and beyond expectations. Anyone can wear tennis shoes, but Nike represents the heart of athleticism. The brand again stands for something precise enough that’s understandable, but vague enough that it’s just easier to say “Nike.”
All of these brands care a lot about what people think about them, but they’re all focused on something that people can initially associate them with and they make people care about that first. They then extend the brand out to mean more than just that one thing. Apple goes into accessories and software and headphones. Starbucks offers tea and pastries and coffee tumblers. Nike offers branded apparel and gym bags and mobile apps.
And so with all of these brands, you can measure perception by thinking about the target they’re trying to hit. “Are we getting people when they think smartphones to first think Apple? Are they thinking Starbucks when they think coffee? Are they thinking Nike when they think shoes?”
That’s actually a much easier measurement to take. You can get it in one question! All it requires is embracing the understanding that your brand isn’t usually all things to all people. It’s usually one thing. But if you get really good at focusing on that one thing and then expand out to other things you’re also good at, people will tend to want to buy those, too.
It’s worked for all the brands I just mentioned, but also for Disney. And 3M. And Arm & Hammer. And Coca-Cola. And Bic. And Chick-Fil-A. And Domino’s Pizza. And Gatorade. And Hallmark. And Frito-Lay. And Hidden Valley. And Tostitos. And Build-A-Bear Workshop. And Shell. And about a thousand other brands I could mention who all have figured out that one thing they can get people to associate with them so that when the average person sees that cloud of a brand from far away, they know what it represents.
And that’s what you want them to see.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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