Five steps to help you think through the Brand Equity process
Brand equity studies continue to be useful tools, despite all the information marketers have about their brands and consumers from countless other sources. They remain useful because they continue to evolve to cover how consumers shop nowadays and because they continue to provide good metrics that marketers still use to measure the progress of their brands such as awareness, importance, and brand perceptions.
So, you have decided to do a Brand Equity study for your brand. Now what? What are some rules of thumb you can follow to make sure your study is set up correctly and provides you with insights that are valid and useful?
To help our own clients better understand how Brand Equity studies are set up, the types of inputs and background information needed, what questions to ask, in what sequence, as well as what results look like and how to interpret them, we prepared and conducted an example Brand Equity study. The brand equity we set up to use an example was the single-serve yogurt category.
We will use this research a case study to develop short deliverables that help guide our clients through the process from start to finish, and give them a leg up when starting to think about Brand Equity.
Setting up a Brand Equity Study – 5 Rules of Thumb
1. Clearly articulate the Category Definition
2. Determine the appropriate Audience and Sample Size
3. Define the Competitive Set
4. Summarize in a concise way the Attributes for Category Importance and Brand Perceptions
5. Determine the Brand Communication Channels
Category definition
It’s very important to clearly articulate the category as accurately as possible because this is what gives consumers the context for their consideration. In our example, we defined the category as 6 oz single-serve yogurts.
This definition accurately describes what we want consumers to think about when answering the questions. We did not want to say something more broad like yogurts, or individual yogurts because consumers may start thinking about larger packages, drinkable yogurts etc
2. Audience and Sample Size
Audience
A Brand Equity study is helpful because it provides a view of the category as a whole, not just about people who purchased in it, or purchase specific brands, but also about category considerers and lapsed category users. In other words, the audience needs to be broad enough to cover the whole category, including current and prospective customers.
In addition, the audience for this type of research does not necessarily have to be defined by demographics (age, gender, etc.). Certain behaviors or attitudes can also be used as screening criteria.
Sample Size
As a rule of thumb, the bigger the sample, the better. We recommend a sample of at least 500 as a good starting place, however given your research needs this can vary. There are several factors you need to consider when deciding on what your Brand Equity’s sample size should be:
Feasibility: How easy is it to get respondents based on the audience you are looking for?
Quotas: Do you need to place quotas on your research audience to reflect the category?
Analysis: Will you be doing any sub-group analysis based on these quotas or other groups of interest?
Margin of error: What margin of error do you feel comfortable with?
Budget: What budget can you afford?
In our Individual Serving Size Yogurt Brand Equity example, we defined audiences as:
Individuals living in the USA
18 years old or higher
Purchased individual serving size yogurts (6 oz.) in the past 3 months and
Are the decision makers or participate in their household’s decisions regarding what grocery items to purchase.
For sample size, we decided to use N=1,000 respondents because we wanted to do analysis by gender, age generations, and ethnic groups and wanted to make sure we had a big enough sample to cover our analysis requirements.
3. Competitive Set
This is an area where many of our clients have difficulty as they either think too broadly, or too narrowly about their competitors. For the purposes of Brand Equity, think about which competitors make up the majority of the market share and include those, as well as new, up and coming players in the category that may be smaller now, but have momentum.
If you try to include all possible competitors, the Brand Equity study will be very long and cumbersome for respondents and deliver very specific brand data that may not be very useful. On the other hand, If you go too narrow, you may be excluding some smaller, but growing players that may develop as competitors without you noticing their progress.
A good rule of thumb if you are not sure is to double check after the initial study what consumers are saying in unaided awareness and adjust your competitive list accordingly.
For our individual yogurt Brand Equity example, through secondary research we ended up including 7 brands, including the top 4 biggest brands by market share and some smaller but growing brands.
As a side note, do not forget to think about Store Brands if they are important players in your specific category!
4. Attributes for Category Importance and Brand Perceptions
This is where background information and future strategic plans come in handy. With these attributes we want to understand what areas are important to consumers when shopping for and deciding what brand to purchase, as well as how they evaluate the brands on each one of these attributes.
This list needs to include functional and emotional areas, areas that your brand is strong on as well as areas you want to strategically move into. However, this should not just be about what your brand currently represents or wants to represent in the future – the attributes need to cover the category as a whole.
In our individual yogurt Brand Equity example, we included attributes that covered a wide variety of areas that may be important to consumers:
Taste
Humane/Fair trade
Flavor options
Types
Cost/Value
Ingredients
Health/Nutrition
Packaging
Premiumness/Leadership
Size
Availability
Emotions
Occasions
5. Communications
Whether or not you have any marketing or advertising communications for your brand, you would want to understand whether consumers hear/see or think they hear/see about your brand anywhere. This helps us understand any movements in metrics such as awareness.
So, think about your marketing and advertising activities, what channels you used including social media and list them out to respondents to see if that is the source of their communication awareness. Keep in mind that many times consumers misattribute what they see/hear to different brands and different channels so this series of questions should be used for guidance.
Other areas to consider while setting up a Brand Equity study are:
Frequency of repeating it (i.e., project waves)
Quotas and quota consistency across different waves
Understanding the impact of new categories or new products
Setting up Brand Equity studies is a process that should be done carefully, thoughtfully, and deliberately with discussions between different teams. If you are interested in learning more about Brand Equity and how Lab42 can help you, contact us at hello@lab42.com.
Stay tuned for more Brand Equity deliverables including how to run correlations to narrow down your list of attributes, conducting advanced analysis to understand what drives purchase and creating Importance quadrant maps.
