Project Scope: Brand Awareness and Needs Discovery

(part of Chapter 2: Defining Your Project's Scope)

 

While defining a project scope may seem like a daunting task, it really comes down to two things; knowing you want to get out of your project, and deciding how you’re going to get it.

It also helps to know some of the common language used to define market research studies. Read on to learn about brand awareness and needs discovery.

 

Brand Awareness

Both consumer and B2B companies track brand awareness and perceptions to inform decisions such as the following:

• How much to invest in brand-building activities.
• What mix of media or channels to invest in (what ratio of print, television, radio, Internet, etc.).
• Which ad campaigns to continue or retire.
• How to adjust brand-building investments by geography.
• How to deploy sales resources to build or leverage brand awareness.

 

Typically, brand awareness research is not something you do just once. You usually do it as a tracker (quarterly or annually), or as a before-and-after study.

For example, if you are about to launch a major new ad campaign, you might measure brand awareness before and after it runs to gauge its impact. If the impact was positive, you have some feedback on what works. If the impact was not so great, you hope you can catch the problem early enough to make corrections.

As an example, one brand awareness tracking study I did was for a PC manufacturer. We did a quarterly data collection to continuously keep up with what was happening. This client advertised using various channels, so it needed to know what was and wasn’t working to help maximize advertising ROI.

In these studies, you measure more than brand awareness. Usually, you’re also measuring key brand perceptions. This involves gathering unaided and aided perceptions of your brand (whether a company-level or product-level brand). Often, perceptions of key competitors are also gathered so that you know how awareness and perceptions of your brand compare.

Why is that useful? Let’s say you learn that 60 percent of your target market perceives your brand as socially responsible. You might think that’s not bad. But what if 95 percent of them think your three biggest competitors are? In that context, that 60 percent figure doesn’t look so great. Competitive data give you a more actionable perspective.

 

Needs Discovery

MR agencies are often engaged to discover the unmet needs of the client’s target market, whether it’s a market that is already being served or one the client plans on serving. For example, let’s say your business primarily serves high-income households with consumer electronics products. You might want to do periodic surveys to answer questions like these:

• How does that market select consumer electronics products?
• What other consumer electronics products do they buy? Which are they happy with?
• What are they not happy with, or, what are their current frustrations that could potentially be met with new products, solutions, or services?

 

Unfortunately, this type of study is not as common as others. All too often, companies create a product or a solution and then work very hard to find a way to sell it (the, “If we build it, they will come,” mentality). Obviously, in an ideal world, a company would first do discovery to understand what the market really wants and needs, and then come up with products and solutions accordingly.

When companies do this type of research, it can deliver a significant competitive advantage; it’s pretty likely your competitors have not invested in that type of research.

 

Special Studies

Of course, in certain industries there are specialty studies as well. Here are some examples:

• In the technology sector, there are specialty studies on technology adoption plans. These are often B2B projects, where surveys of IT decision-makers (CIOs, vice presidents of IT, IT directors) seek to find out what technologies they plan to adopt, which they’ve actually budgeted for, which they plan to evaluate, and so forth.
• In the pharmaceutical industry, doctors are surveyed to gauge their propensity to prescribe specific types of pharmaceuticals.
• For website testing, eyeball tracking studies literally track how users’ eyes scan the screen.

 

This is an excerpt from the book, "How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies," which is available on Amazon. Published by Research Rockstar LLC. Copyright © by Kathryn Korostoff. All rights reserved.