There are numerous reasons for optimism!
Of course, the current context is not super exiting… Ukraine war, inflation, climate change…
It is only reasonable that companies fear for their business, the income streams and their bottom line. One may anticipate that they will naturally be very careful with how they spend their marketing resources in order to protect against potential disasters.
But is it not reasonable to think that one should endeavor to better understand the customers and the ways to communicate with them to deliver consumption when the situations change, the consumers change, and their priorities set in a different direction? Differently put: This is not when it gets dark out, and people suddenly change directions, that you turn off the lights of the car!
Consequently, you require a more acute eyesight than before. And that’s why it is crucial to invest in market research despite the slow economy.
Investing in market research will help you make smarter decisions, whatever the economic situation. And that will positively impact your bottom line. With good, reliable data, you’ll be able to adjust your spending and make changes to your strategy when needed, without wasting money. This will help you spend your marketing budget more wisely and achieve better results.
Thanks to market research, you can also pinpoint more ways to continue your activities. One of these is linking your products with growth-enhancing entertainment licensing, relying on the emotional connection of this safe haven license.
You must also consider the best ways for brands to interact with their customers, particularly if those customers change their behavior due to the economy. Basically, know of the best moments and strategies for drawing attention to your brands. Additionally, decide which message is most appropriate for the challenging time so that the ‘what’ and ‘how’ are in line.
The holy grail of any company is the loyal customer base. And you ought to nurture and expand it whenever you can, not only during lean economic times. However, the reality is that devoted customers could also promote your products and services.
Therefore, you must first understand these unique individuals, their loyalties, and the motivations behind their pleading for your products. Additionally, you must verify that you comprehend the brand image. Developing a ‘love brand’ during this period is crucial. Only a thorough and high-quality market research can provide an answer to these questions.
BrandTrends Group is a market research company which has developed a unique approach for monitoring brand popularity and appeal across countries, across targets and – which is one of the key strengths of our models – along time.
Combining all those aspects, BrandTrends Group benefits from robust and detailed data to support companies effort in building relevant and powerful strategies for driving growth.
BrandTrends is composed of a suite of syndicated approaches but is also able to set up ad hoc and customized approaches for covering a specific topic.
Whatever is the methodology applied, BrandTrends Group is focused on offering actionable insights. We translate your business questions into research objectives and research learnings into insights.
For illustrating this, we’ve detailed below some examples of learnings we can extract, analyze and extrapolate for providing a clear and detailed overview of a specific market.
The learnings below are extracted from our syndicated approach BrandTrends, and more specifically from the type of analyses built around our key proprietary indicator: the Brand Popularity Index.
Then, let’s start with the beginning, by defining Brand Popularity.
At BrandTrends, we’ve created a unique composite index named Brand Popularity Index.
The BPI is a combination of 4 key indicators and results in a score benchmarked across targets, countries, categories…
The selected indicators offer the opportunity to measure and understand the brand strengths and weaknesses and, combined all together, are predictive of the purchase intent.
The objective with BPI is to evaluate the brand’s presence in consumer’s minds, as well as the brand proximity in order to make sure that the brand is relevant for consumers and benefits from an edge vs competition.
‘By identifying how brands are salient in mind, able to go through the clutter and make an edge vs competition, you make sure to maximize your opportunities to drive merchandise appeal and sales at retail.’ explains Philippe Guinaudeau, CEO at BrandTrends Group. ‘It is not only a matter of reaching consumers, which is the initial step to ensure your brand is in their minds, but also in fostering affinity. This affinity is essential for effectively meeting consumers' needs and expectations.’ completes Guinaudeau.
The BPI is not only a data per se. By benchmarking the popularity vs competition, and by deeply understanding the composition of the indicator, brands may understand their strengths and weaknesses, adapt their development plan and drive growth. And this is why Brand Popularity is so important in today’s market.
Licensors may adapt their communication plan, highlight their license’s strengths and compensate their weaknesses for maximizing their appeal.
By fully unraveling the power factors of your brands as a licensor, they can drive their relationships with their licensees.
By determining which unique brand draws a specific product category, they can ascertain the identities of their potential licensees.
By employing smart techniques, they may considerably increase the value of a brand and improve its positioning. This strategically strengthens their brand’s positioning.
Licensees may make sure that their positioning is clearly understood and fit with the objectives attributed.
They can position their brands to benefit from changing consumer habits and preferences.
They can target their Product Distribution. They can precisely focus your product distribution by determining which brand draws a specific product category among their demographic target markets.
They can explore and examine any channel opportunities. They may best investigate and study channel potential by assessing their consumers' retail visiting patterns and behaviors.
Agents may offer relevant and powerful recommendations, based on brand’s objectives and licenses performances.
They can Gauge Opportunities. They can assess opportunities based on brand popularity.
They can best identify potential Licensees by recognizing the brand that attracts a specific product category.
They can support and assist in the development of appropriate brand extensions.
Retailers may develop and finetune their distribution strategy and identify new clusters.
They may optimize their merchandising activity and operations by analyzing which store chains are more likely to be visited by targeted brand consumers.
They can discover partners and opportunities. They may find out about prospective collaborations and cross-merchandising opportunities.
They can also assess Trends and verify markers. They may determine whether patterns in other brands are reliable indicators of their own brand's future.
And this is only some examples of how to leverage Brand Popularity.
How exploring the brand popularity ranking provides valuable insights on market opportunities.
We’ve just explained why the brand popularity is a strong indicator for providing a deep understanding of brand’s performances.
Let’s now going even more in details by exploring the type of learnings which can be extracted from the ranking of top popular brand.
This is a valuable combination of learnings about market structure and insights on how to build a strong positioning for the brands.
‘We systematically conduct a rigorous analysis of the Top 30 popular brands ranking on a quarterly basis. This routine unveils a comprehensive picture of market dynamics across diverse regions and the globe," explains Guinaudeau. "It's one of the best opportunities to gain full insights into market trends, identify new opportunities, and address pain points effectively. Our duty is to support our clients in crafting robust strategies, and brand popularity serves as one of our essential tools in achieving that goal.’ continues Guinaudeau.
First of all, the ranking of the top 30 popular brand illustrates the gap between each other’s. It makes clear how the market is structured.
Along the time, we’ve seen multiple combination. Among which a strong leader and a myriad of smaller players, a set of leaders followed by a set of challengers, a fully balanced market… The market’s structure is crucial to define the opportunities for current and upcoming players. This is one of the best opportunities to identify white spaces.
Second, it helps to identify how the brands positioning is structured in terms of age and gender.
The most successful brands are strong across genders and multi-generational. Having a larger targeting helps in settling the brand on market by minimizing the risk of being challenged by the current competition and newcomers. Opportunities to be exposed to the brand are maximized for consumers and this favors the familiarity and loyalty. Marvel perfectly illustrates this learning.
Of course, some may apply a different strategy, choosing to be highly focused on a specific target and pushing hard for the leadership. This reduces the potential market but can be balanced by the fact to continuously renew the attractiveness among its sweet spot, decade after decade. Barbie is the perfect example here.
Depending on the market overall structure and the specific brand positioning, the different players have to adapt their strategy.
Being strong on a specific target among a large-scale market implies to strengthen their affinity, providing an even-better user experience and adapting their messages.
In the opposite, having a larger profiling among a hardly target-focused market can be opposed by multiplying the partnerships for extending the current target and appear as relevant for new ones.
Third, the brand matrix allows to qualify the market categorization. On a single view, it becomes really easy to identify the clusters of brands such as toys & games, movies & tv shows, video games… This emphasizes the importance of adapting the communication plan and make sure to be visible for consumers. For fighting the competition, it may be relevant to use the same touchpoints and target to maximize reach or, in the opposite, to optimize affinity and maximize effectiveness.
Fourth, this market’s categorization also helps in identifying the winning strategies. Understanding how leaders have built their success makes clear the winning recipes for meeting consumer’s expectations and driving growth.
This includes the type of content, products, services to be investigated, but also the type of partnership and licensing opportunities to be covered.
Fifth, this market’s categorization also makes clear the categories which didn’t succeed in tapping into the market. If absent from the graph, this implies that no one have really convinced consumers. Going through the current market structure will be even more though for a new comer.
In the other hand, this represent an opportunity of being the first to conquer the market, optimizing the opportunity for a stronger positioning in the future.
Of course, this analysis can be built on the total market or per target, allowing to access a full overview of the brands performances for building a relevant and powerful development plan.
‘For over a decade, I have consistently delved into brand popularity rankings each quarter, and it has never failed to captivate me," comments Guinaudeau. "Every time, I gain fresh insights, effortlessly assimilate market trends, and the historical data presents an excellent opportunity to identify both enduring and emerging long-term trends’ completes Guinaudeau.
How the comparison of Brand Popularity and Purchase Intent is crucial for defining the priorities for the brand.
Some brands may be well-known, but they fail to pique consumer attention. Others are appealing, but only to a specific audience. Then, how can you find the most enticing licenses, the ones with the most promise, and create an appropriate marketing strategy to help you grow?
This is to help you answering those questions that BrandTrends Group has created the brand matrix. The brand matrix is one of the key BrandTrends analyses. For the Top 30 most popular brands, it relates the Brand Popularity Index with Purchase Intent.
We’ve detailed the Brand Popularity above. The purchase intention is defined as the ability of brands to inspire attraction for things offered in stores.
The brand matrix allows multiple analysis and provide a combination of valuable insights.
With what could be considered as a simple graph, you access to a deep overview of what happen on market. It aids in comprehending the dynamics of a market. As a result, it emphasizes numerous critical insights about how the market is structured and what leads to target success.
Here, we have 3 key scenarios.
The first one is the most common one and applies to brand having a well-balanced brand popularity and purchase intent.
This means that their strategy is efficient. They’re building their brand equity while driving growth at the same time.
This makes their positioning strong, as the messages, services and products they deliver are relevant for consumers and are translated into appeal.
At this stage, they can be considered as successful and their main objective should be to even extend their popularity for driving even more purchase intent and increase their revenues.
They can think about extending their presence in investigating new categories but should keep in mind to be consistent with their DNA and what has made their success.
Attracting new consumers is a good deal only if the current one remains loyal to the brand.
The second scenario is at the opposite and includes the brands reaching a higher popularity than purchase intent.
Consumer’s have them in mind and like the brand but this proximity to customers, however, does not convert into merchandise attractiveness, and buy intent should be higher.
This demonstrates the absence of products on the market capable of meeting consumer expectations. By refining their licensing approach, the brands should consider generating new sorts of content.
By offering more products, those brands would also create additional opportunities to connect with consumers and create a virtual circle for nurturing both salience and proximity, then settle their growth.
The last scenario is the opposite and involves brands with higher demand than popularity.
They're part of people's lives as evergreen brands, so they don't need to deliver material to be appealing. This relates to the iconic brands, those who are there since decades, or, on a shorter term, those who are highly fashionable. Some may be at the frontier between both, Mickey Mouse being a good example here.
If some may consider that the contract is completed and that sales are the priority, those brands may think about building a stronger proximity with consumers, for definitely settling their positioning and make sure to keep their edge in the future, whatever are the new comers popping up on market.
This can be done by implementing relevant licensing strategies, which would make brands able to connect with their target audience more effectively.
On top, this would even increase their appeal, and provide new prospects for growth.
Philippe Guinaudeau concludes ‘The Brand Matrix is my favorite type of analysis. In a single view, it provides a complete comprehensive overview of valuable insights from our measurements. Of course, other analyses are crucial too at some point, as they all help us understand what's happening in the market and how brands are performing. These insights are essential for creating successful plans and achieving brand strategies. However, the Brand Matrix is the best starting point for our analysis, and that's why we always begin there when working with our clients.
It is critical for brands to understand what drives their popularity and to choose the appropriate indicator to focus on to increase their customer appeal. This can be determined by salience, proximity, offer, or a combination of these factors. Popularity can be tracked over time, between countries, and across goals to discover winning strategies and areas for development.
And BrandTrends Group can help here.
Having detailed how Brand Popularity works, let's now explore some concrete examples.
For illustrating our purpose, we’ll take a closer look at a concrete example. Then, in the following paragraphers, we’ll detailed the main findings about brands performances in Germany, among young girls 3 to 9 years old.
The analyzed results have shown some interesting findings, especially in terms of how key licenses were offered to young girls – and where many prominent brands were missing out on sales.
The first learning comes from the brand popularity ranking itself.
Barbie, Paw Patrol and Frozen were the most popular entertainment brands among German girls aged three to nine. The brands scored between 56 and 42 on the Brand Popularity Index (BPI), which is a comfortable level for building the gap vs other players.
The second learning comes from the purchase intent ranking.
Here, we’ve seen that more than 60% of girls would like a Lego or a Mickey Mouse product, and around 50% would push for a Frozen or a Minions item.
The third learning comes from the comparison between popularity and purchase intention scores for the different brands.
Overall, we’ve seen a big divide between the most popular brands (Barbie, Paw Patrol and Frozen) and the most wanted brands (Lego, Mickey Mouse).
The fourth learning comes from the explanation for explaining this gap.
In truth, the discrepancy stems from the intentions to purchase products with Lego or Mickey Mouse on them. These are long-established brands that appeal to a large scope of demographics (boys and girls, from infants to teenagers when not adults). This explains the very robust purchase intentions on those brands.
In Germany, the results of the most popular brands, which are often girlish and focused on a short demographic break, would be the standard. The result of their high popularity comes from the facts these are the most well-known as well as most-loved brands!
Furthermore, the most popular brands face an interesting phenomenon where their purchase intentions are lower than expected, defying the typical trend.
This occurrence can be attributed to the fact that certain brands like Barbie, Frozen, and Paw Patrol are not adequately stocked on shelves with a diverse range of products catering to the entire age group, which spans from 3 to 9 years old. As a result, some product categories abruptly stop for girls aged 7 and above, despite their continued interest from the girls in consumer products associated with these brands.
The data clearly indicates a significant gap in the availability of products on store shelves. While girls show immense enthusiasm for these brands, the licensed products they desire are simply not accessible. Leading brands are potentially missing out on crucial opportunities by wrongly assuming that their female customers are uninterested in these brands or a broader range of product categories. It is essential to ensure that these highly admired products are readily available on shelves, especially during the peak of brand popularity. Failing to do so leads to lost revenue opportunities and hinders broader brand appeal and awareness. Many licenses still hold untapped high sales potential that can be effectively explored with the right approach.
From the BrandTrends research, girls would be keen on buying into their most popular brands if they had the same access to them as the long-established ones, which they currently don’t. Instead, space is likely being taken up by brands that ranked less popular with the German girls interviewed. This is a very positive spin for the competition as well as for the health of the sector. This is a supply market, and the more the merrier. However, opportunities are missed there for all of these licensees.
Now, crafting strong strategies and driving growth are in your hands
Having grasped the significance of market research and its role in understanding brand popularity, it's time to take action. Keep these insights in mind to gather the data necessary for your business's success.
Brand Popularity serves as more than just a syndicated and benchmarked indicator of brand performance. It offers valuable insights into market trends, identifies new opportunities for development, and enables early anticipation of obstacles and changes.
When analyzed alongside purchase intent, Brand Popularity unveils the dynamics of the market, revealing winning strategies and untapped potential.
By delving deep into the indicators used to construct Brand Popularity, priorities for brands become clear. It shows whether the focus should be on salience and awareness, proximity and affinity, or a combination of both. Different scenarios are explored based on individual brand performance and comparison with competitors.
For supporting your efforts, BrandTrends can be of assistance. We continuously monitor brands and licenses appeal, measuring their popularity and appeal. We also conduct research on consumer attitudes and behaviors, including those of children and families, in about 50 different countries. Therefore, be aware of the achievements and failures that may be useful to you in your own country. Furthermore, we can also carry out any exclusive bespoke study that you specify. So, to find the best answers to your questions, complete the contact form above!
Comentários