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The fact that brands have become more important in the 21st-century marketplace should not come as a surprise to brand managers or CMOs. What often does come as a surprise is that today's consumers no longer behave the way they "say" they will. Why? Because the brand engagement, bonding, and loyalty process is more emotional than rational, a change from years past. Brand Keys, Inc. is the only research consultancy that specializes in customer loyalty and engagement, providing brand equity metrics that accurately predict future, in-market consumer behavior that correlates with sales and profitability. Our approach uncovers and quantifies both the rational and the emotional motivations behind consumers' decisions in your category. And, by understanding what motivates loyalty and engagement, you will be able to y y y Identify and anticipate unmet needs and expectations, Quantify your brand's 'Customer Loyalty Gap' the difference between what consumers "say" they want, and what actually drives their behavior, and Measure Return-On-Investment of all media and marketing initiatives in advance of spend!
If you are able to do that, you'll be able to develop, launch, and grow your brand according to the Rule of Six: Loyal consumers are six times more likely to: y y y y y y y y Engage with your brand. Pay attention to your marketing and advertising messages. Think better of you Buy (and re-buy) your products or services Resist competitive appeals (attribute, benefit or dollar-based) Recommend your product or service to others Invest in your company (if it's publicly traded) Give your product or service the benefit of the doubt in uncertain situations
and not just abstract norms. To do that you need to know what consumers think, not what they say they think. Brand Keys measures are scientifically validated via a national probability sample in the US and UK, with statistical reliability at the 95% confidence level. The application of our predictive brand loyalty and engagement metrics have been used in 26 countries around the world, in B2C and B2B categories, with similar results. Validity studies using our technique to better understand brand values, leverage media and marketing opportunities, and craft meaningful and strategic communications can be found on this site. There is no other technique currently available including persuasion measures that provides the kinds of insights and predictive results that correlate so highly to sales! Want an impartial perspective? In 2006, the Advertising Research Foundation conducted a formal "Research Review" on the Brand Keys Loyalty/Engagement Measurement Methodology. We invite you to read the ARF First Opinion Research Review and to share it with others in your company. In our opinion, the goal of your research must be to learn: y y y y What people think as opposed to what they say they think. "How high is up" for customer expectations in your category. How the purchase decision for your category is really made. How consumers will behave in the marketplace.
To attain this goal, you need: y y y y To be able to measure the direction and velocity of category values and customer values. To understand what consumers really expect from the category and your brand. To know what customers and prospects are willing to believe about your brand. To understand how customers view the category, compare offerings in the category and, ultimately, buy in the category.
number of respondents yields reliable, generalizable results. Our measurements are scientifically validated via a national probability sample in the US and UK, with statistical reliability at the 95% confidence level. It has been further tested in 23 countries around the world, with similar results. Independent studies conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation showed that no theoretical framework including persuasion measures is more highly correlated with sales than ours. If this were all there was to it, anyone with a moderate amount of training in psychological testing and access to a worldwide field-research infrastructure could do what we do. But there is one more crucial step without which the raw survey results would be worthless to our clients: the weightings. The formulas that translate the undigested survey data into the weighted results we provide our clients were painstakingly developed over a period of years by Dr. Passikoff and a team of statisticians and computer analysts. These proprietary algorithms, as central to Brand Keys as the secret syrup formula is to Coca-Cola, are at the heart of what we do. And, as no one else has managed to crack the code, they are the reason no other firm in the world can deliver a research product as powerful as ours.
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These measures provide an intimate understanding of the values that drive customer loyalty and engagement in your category. From here it is a straightforward step to formulate every type of brand and marketing initiative, from creative direction to communications strategies to packaging to strategic planning all the way to retooling the product or service. And, because in the real world budgets are limited, the measures make it easy to allocate budgets and decide which initiatives are necessary immediately and which can wait, or even be ignored. Clearly, this information is valuable to all our clients, not just those with high loyalty and engagement scores.
they characterize actual brands: by personification. The result the category Ideal is a detailed picture of what people are willing to believe about a brand in the category. One example of how this works: In the mid 1990s, Brand Keys did a quarterly series of minivan surveys for the Chrysler Corporation. The results were relatively stable over the course of the first several studies. Then something changed. In personifying the ideal van, respondents suddenly had significantly higher expectations regarding a value we identified as "accessibility." In presenting the results, we did not attempt to pin a specific meaning on this value, believing it could correspond to a number of minivan attributes and features. To their credit, the Chrysler people quickly drew their own inference: to meet the newly elevated expectations for accessibility, they would engineer and build the first four-door vans in the marketplace. Chrysler Corporation's four-door minivans were an unqualified success. It took the competition two to three years to catch up. Like all Brand Keys work, this study: y y y Captured customer values long before they would have appeared on the radar screen of conventional research; Showed what people were really thinking about, perhaps before they consciously knew what they were thinking about; Revealed values and emotions that are inaccessible to the direct questions of conventional research.
A similar logic yields the ROI of any corporate initiative. We start by measuring brand equity (the relationship between your brand's loyalty-driver curve and the Ideal curve) before and after customers are exposed to the initiative. Then, by dividing the "after" measure with the "before" measure, we obtain a precise quantitative measure of the initiative's ROI (which we call the Brand Multiple):
The Brand Multiple can be calculated within weeks of an initiative's launch; it can even be calculated before an initiative's launch. This allows our clients to swiftly overhaul or retract low-Brand Multiple initiatives before wasting too much money and effort, and to throw more marketing weight behind initiatives whose Brand Multiple indicates a strong potential for a hit in the marketplace.
In summary.
We firmly believe there is no better way to leverage customer loyalty and engagement than to integrate Brand Keys metrics into your company's planning processes. Get in touch with us. We'll be happy to show you what we can do.