Insight + Strategy Resources

Uncovering the Right Brand Expression: Building a Brand Positioning

Branding has many functions that go beyond its most basic requirement of identification of a product. Branding when done well frames what consumers can expect from a product and can become an important part of the proposition itself.

Using Market Insights in a Brand Reputation Crises

It seems like every week another company who you would think would know better, finds a new and creative way to undermine their business through unethical practices, unchecked rogue employees, or just finding they are seriously out of steps with the values of the rest of society. Brand reputation, that most precious of business assets that take years to establish, can quickly disappear.

How Perceptions of Choice Risk Shape Brand Choice

Brand choice is about prediction. What will the brand deliver? While a brand could deliver many things, rarely is anything certain. Consumers know this, and where there is uncertainty it is a driver of many of their emotions during and after making a decision. While a consumer may not always voice their choices in terms of managing risk associated with uncertainty, we see it in their behaviour; we see it in their brand choices.

Using Customer Insights to Build a Customer Centric Business

Becoming a customer-centric business seems simple enough in principle; keep your customers at the centre of your business decision making. What that means in practice is something else. Among the many reasons business fail to become customer-centric is that their customer understanding does reflect what drives customer behaviour.

Going Mobile with Market Research

Mobile devices are increasingly used to complete surveys that were traditionally completed on personal computer. In a number of our recent general population studies the proportion of people completing a survey with a mobile device is 25% to 30% and with 69% of adults having a smartphone the proportion using their smartphone to complete a survey is likely to increase.

Understanding and Using Consumer Ritual Behaviour in Marketing

When you think of ritual behaviour what comes to mind? Maybe it is the ancient chants and symbolic behaviour of priests or other religious figures or maybe the quaint traditions of people in some idyllic holiday location.

What If Market Research Reports used Click Bait Titles?

In the past few years the insight industry has looked at debated almost every facet of what we do in order to better understand consumers and deliver insights that are actionable and engaging. This tongue-in-cheek post plays with the idea that maybe we need to write more engaging report titles.

Random Acts of Service: Would your customer service pass the Turing Test?

Who is likely to give you the best customer service, a human or a robot? While the answer may seem obvious (hint: the human!), automated services are hard to beat for routine types of services, and they are getting better!

How to Write a Market Research Brief that Delivers Actionable Results

David Ogilvy’s quote of “give me the freedom of a tight brief” is as true for market research briefs as it is for advertising. It is hard to doubt the importance of writing a brief both for the agency and for yourself. Yet they take up precious time needed to get other things done and can appear to require you to give direction when it is the direction you need.

Seven Ways To Get The Best From Your Brand Tracking

Brand tracking studies, whether done continuously or periodically, represent one of the largest research investments a company makes.

Creating Distinctive Advertising and Knowing Why

There is a rule of thumb you can use to work out potential advertising effectiveness for your campaign. After looking at the creative and ticking off that it meets the creative brief put it away and then after several hours, ideally the next day, try and remember what you saw, read or heard. Then ask yourself these four questions:

Building a Customer Centric Business with Customer Journey Mapping

Creating a customer-centric business is not just about creating products and services that satisfy; it is also about creating an experience that drives business outcomes. A win-win situation for you and your customers. An approach that has helped many businesses to create a customer-centric business is customer engagement mapping.

Linking Service Delivery to Customer Behaviour

What drives customer retention and repeat buying? Having the right product at the right price is definitely key to keeping your customers. However, when products are easily substituted and prices are competitive it is the service experience that can create your sustainable competitive advantage.

Using the Customer Lifecycle to Drive Service Improvement

With each encounter a customer’s experience with your business changes and so do their expectations, the products they use, and which service delivery channels they rely on. Similarly, as a customer – business or consumer – moves through their lifecycle with your business the relevant management decisions reflecting business growth change.

Improving Your Research with the EAST Framework

In a previous post, I discussed how the EAST framework, built from behavioural economics, can help diagnose compliance problems and be used to increase the number of your customers. In this post, I’m going to show how I use the framework for fine-tuning research design to improve response rates in both qualitative and quantitative studies.

Using Behavioural Economics’ EAST Framework to Improve Uptake and Compliance

You have the product that you know customers will want, the price is right, you have distribution, and the advertising achieved that all-important top quartile result. So where are all the sales? Likewise, your charity is just and your name is known but people are not making donations.

Getting the Best from Your Stakeholder & Channel Marketing

Who is your market? The answer to this apparently simple question (or answering the better question of ‘who are your markets?’) has major implications for business strategy and your business model. Even the simplest of products have multiple types of stakeholders that can drive demand. These relationships exist at category and individual levels, exerting influences that can affect product access and consumption.

What Type Of Relationship Do You Have With Your Customers?

A friend of many years helps you to re-turf and landscape the backyard over the long weekend. As a sign of your appreciation, you decide to give them $100 for the effort. After all, he spent his time and incurred costs to help you. Smart move? Surely your friend would appreciate the cash! When you start with price, you end with the price, and that price may be more than you bargained for!