Brand Market Research: Understanding Your Brand’s Position in the Market

This blog post explores brand market research by describing what brand market research is, its overall importance, related methodologies, and how it can empower your business to develop a long-term, successful brand strategy. 

With today’s rapidly expanding marketplaces and new businesses forming every day, simply having a great product or service isn't always enough. To really thrive and stand out in your product/service category, you need to focus on cultivating a strong brand that resonates with your target audience. While this might sound easier said than done, it all starts with a deep understanding of your brand's position in the market through thorough brand market research.

Table of Contents: 

• What is brand market research?
• Why is brand market research important?
• Types of market research studies
• Methods and strategies for conducting brand market research
• How to conduct brand market research
• Tools to enhance your brand market research
• How is brand market research different from brand analysis?
• Improve your market research efforts with quantilope

What is brand market research?

Brand market research (or simply, brand research) is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your brand, your target market, and your competitive environment. Think of it as a multi-faceted lens that allows you to:

• Understand your audience: Who are they? What are their needs, desires, and pain points? What motivates their purchasing decisions?
• Assess your brand perception: How do consumers perceive your brand? What are their brand associations? What is your overall brand image?
• Analyze the market: What are the current market trends? Who are your main competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Are there whitespace opportunities to explore?

By answering these questions (and more), brand research provides a solid foundation for informed decision-making and strategic planning.
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Why is brand market research important?

With consumer preferences constantly changing alongside new trends and fads, brand research is no longer a "nice-to-have" but a necessity for brands to remain relevant and successful. 

Using brand market research, businesses put themselves in a better position to…

• Craft compelling messaging: By understanding your target audience through research, you can tailor your messaging to resonate with their values, aspirations, and needs. For example, if your research reveals that your target audience values sustainability, you can emphasize your brand's eco-friendly practices in your branding strategy.  
• Optimize your marketing efforts: Instead of blindly throwing money at various marketing approaches, brand research helps you identify the most effective channels and tactics to reach your target market. For instance, if your research shows that your audience is highly active on Instagram, you can prioritize your social media marketing efforts on that platform over others. 
• Develop successful new products: Launching a new product always comes with some form of risk. Brand research can help you mitigate that risk by gauging consumer interest early on and identifying potential pain points before you even hit the market. This might involve conducting online surveys to understand consumer preferences or organizing focus groups to gather detailed feedback on product prototypes.
• Strengthen your brand identity: Your brand identity is what sets you apart from the competition. Brand research allows you to measure brand awareness, track brand recall, and shape a brand image that fosters long-term brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
• Boost profitability: Ultimately, the goal of any business is to be profitable. By leveraging research to understand your core customer base, their needs, and their customer experience, you can optimize your pricing, product development, and marketing efforts to drive business profitability.

These are just a few of the many reasons why it makes sense to invest in brand market research. It’s an upfront investment that has a lot of long-term value and benefits. 
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Types of market research studies

Knowing the importance of brand research, it’s worth noting that this type of research comes in various forms, each designed to answer different questions and provide uniquely valuable insights. 

Below are a few types of market research studies that provide insight on your brand: 

• Exploratory research: This type of research is often used when you're venturing into uncharted territory, aiming to gain initial understanding of a particular market trend or consumer behavior. In the context of brand research, it could be useful during a rebrand or when entering a new subcategory. Imagine you're a coffee shop considering introducing a new line of vegan pastries to your brand. Exploratory research, such as conducting in-person interviews with potential customers, could help you understand their preferences and identify potential demand.
• Descriptive research: As the name suggests, descriptive research gets more specific (compared to exploratory research). It aims to describe characteristics around your brand, such as demographics or brand associations. For example, your brand might conduct online surveys to understand the age, gender, and income levels of your target audience or to assess their perception of your brand vs. competitors.
• Causal research: This type of research seeks to understand cause-and-effect relationships. For instance, you might conduct an experiment to determine how different pricing strategies impact brand sales or how changes in packaging design affect brand recognition.

The type of research you choose will depend on your specific brand goals and what you’re hoping to achieve through your research. Below, we’ll talk more about actual methods and strategies you can leverage.
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Methods and strategies for conducting brand market research

When people think of market research, they often think of online surveys. While surveys are a great form of quantitative research (and we explain how to leverage this form of research below), there are also many other ways to collect brand information; below are just a few of them: 

Surveys

Surveys are a form of quantitative research, allowing you to gather numerical data from a large respondent pool. Online surveys and questionnaires are particularly useful for measuring brand awareness, brand recognition, and brand perception. For example, you could ask respondents to rate their familiarity with your brand on a scale of 1 to 5 or to select words that they associate with your brand from a list. Surveys allow brands to gather their collected data and generate intuitive charts to share with stakeholders. When using a survey, brands have the choice between traditional agency partners or online research platforms like quantilope that use automation and advanced analytics to streamline the process. 

Interviews

While surveys provide breadth, interviews offer depth. In-depth one-on-one consumer interviews allow you to explore individual experiences and opinions in detail, providing rich qualitative insights. This approach to research is particularly useful for understanding complex issues or exploring sensitive topics. For instance, you might interview customers who have recently switched brands to understand their reasons for doing so. 

Focus groups

Focus groups take one-on-one interviews a step further by bringing together a small group of individuals for a moderated discussion. This method allows you to observe group dynamics and gather qualitative insights on topics such as brand perception, messaging, and new product concepts. For example, you could show a focus group a series of brand advertisements and ask for their feedback on the messaging, visuals, and overall ad effectiveness. Group settings often inspire individuals to build off on another’s feedback and share more detailed insights. 

Social listening

In today's digital age, social media is a goldmine of consumer insights. Social listening involves monitoring online conversations and mentions of your brand to understand brand sentiment, track brand performance, and identify emerging market trends. This could involve tracking hashtags related to your brand, analyzing reviews on online platforms, or monitoring brand-related discussions in online communities. The best part about social listening is that unless you pay for a service to analyze sentiment, it’s free! 

Customer behavior data

Your customers' actions speak louder than words. Analyzing website traffic, purchase history, and other behavioral data can provide valuable insights into customer experience and identify areas for improvement. For example, if you notice a high bounce rate on a particular product page for your brand, it could indicate that you need to redesign the page layout or clarify the product information. 

Competitor analysis

Keeping a close eye on your competitors is crucial for staying ahead in the game. Competitive analysis involves evaluating your competitors' marketing strategies, brand positioning, and brand equity to identify opportunities for differentiation. This could involve analyzing their website content, social media presence, pricing strategies, and customer reviews.
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How to conduct brand market research

Effective brand research requires thoughtful planning and execution. Below is a step-by-step guide to follow as a general guideline: 

1. Define your research questions: Before you even begin drafting your research study, start by clearly defining your objectives. What do you want to learn from your findings? Are you exploring brand perception, measuring brand loyalty, or assessing the impact of your marketing efforts? Clearly defined research questions will guide your research design and ensure that you gather the relevant data needed.
2. Identify your target audience: Who are you trying to reach with your brand? Defining your target market is crucial for ensuring that your research findings are relevant and actionable. This involves considering factors such as demographics, consumer behavior, lifestyle, interests, and needs.
3. Choose your research methods: The type of research and brand research methods you choose will depend on your research questions, target audience, and budget. Consider the pros and cons of each method (mentioned above) and choose the one(s) that best align with your needs.
4. Gather your data: This is where you’ll finally put your research plan into action. Conduct online surveys, interviews, focus groups, or leverage social listening tools (or, use a combination of methods) to gather the necessary data that will answer your research questions and objectives. Ensure that your data collection methods are ethical and as unbiased as possible.
5. Analyze your findings: Once you've gathered your data, it's time to make use of it. This involves cleaning, organizing, and analyzing the data to extract actionable insights. Use appropriate statistical techniques and data visualization tools to identify patterns, trends, and relationships in the data that you can share with key stakeholders. 

Best practices for brand market research

To ensure the quality and effectiveness of your brand research, also keep these best practices in mind while following the steps above:

• Ensure your sample size is representative of your target market. If your sample is not representative, your findings may not be generalizable to the wider population.
• Use clear and concise language in your questionnaires and surveys. Avoid jargon, technical terms, and leading questions that could bias your results...
• ...and speaking of bias, be mindful of personal biases in your research methods and data analysis by having other team members review a survey or research study before it goes out to participants. 
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Tools to enhance your brand market research

Navigating brand research can feel like a daunting task, but thankfully, there are some powerful market research tools available to help you gather and analyze brand data effectively. Here are a few options to consider: 

• quantilope: quantilope’s platform offers the largest suite of automated advanced methods combined with AI-driven analytics and an intuitive platform interface to streamline data collection and analysis. With quantilope, brands can collaborate in real-time to uncover deep qualitative and quantitative insights with speed and agility. Whether it’s running concept tests, exploring brand perception, or measuring customer satisfaction, quantilope provides the tools you need to feel confident in data-driven business decisions.
• Brandwatch: This social listening tool allows you to track brand mentions across social media, analyze sentiment, identify key influencers, and understand how your brand image is evolving in online conversations.
• Google Trends: Google Trends is a free tool that can crawl Google’s search engine and social media platforms for trends or mentions of particular brand terms. Brands can get helpful information about their brand like the frequency of certain brand-related search terms, locations of search queries, and the context around search terms. 
• Social Mention: Social Mention is a another free service that focuses on how social media creates and impacts brand awareness and perceptions. It monitors major social media platforms to establish how many times a brand has been mentioned. Social Mention keeps tabs on the types of mentions - whether positive or negative, counts how many people are talking about a brand (or competitive brands) in real-time, and provides an overview of brand perceptions. 
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How is brand market research different from brand analysis?

While the terms "brand market research" and "brand analysis" are often used interchangeably, there's a subtle but important distinction.

Brand market research primarily focuses on gathering external data about your target market and competitive landscape. It's about understanding your customers, their needs, and how they perceive your brand in relation to your competitors. Think online surveys, focus groups, and social listening.

Brand analysis, on the other hand, often involves a more internal assessment of your brand. It delves into your brand identity, brand value, brand equity, and how effectively you're communicating your brand positioning. This might involve auditing your marketing materials, analyzing your brand's visual identity, or assessing your internal brand culture.
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Improve your market research efforts with quantilope

quantilope empowers brands to conduct agile and impactful brand research. The Consumer Intelligence Platform automates even the most complex tasks and methodologies, allowing teams to gather more information about their brand with less tedious and manual efforts than they would with a traditional research agency. quantilope platforms users benefit from from: 

• Automated survey creation: Build sophisticated brand surveys quickly and easily with quantilope’s drag-and-drop interface for a library of questions and methods, along with entirely pre-built survey templates that are customizable as needed. 
• Advanced analytics: Go beyond basic brand insights by leveraging the largest suite of automated advanced methods. Uncover hidden patterns, identify key drivers of brand perception, and segment your audience based on their needs and preferences.
• Real-time insights: Track your brand's performance in real-time with quantilope’s dynamic dashboards and reporting features, that automatically update with any newly available data in your project. 

Whether your brand is just beginning its market research process or looking to revamp existing brand studies, get in touch below to learn how quantilope can help!