Brand auditing market research

Brand auditing market research, will review a brand's health, has several instrumental benefits to companies, it:

• Identifies awareness and knowledge gaps that may inform marketing communications with customers, prospects, suppliers or internally.
• Allows companies to prioritise brand attributes in the purchasing decision.
• Identifies strengths and weaknesses of a company’s brand that may identify key product or service improvements.
• Allows companies to understand any gaps in perception between target groups.
• Allows companies to monitor perceptions of the brand over time and gauge improvements.

Your brand can play a key role in the end purchase of your product, and so we advise the following areas are carefully looked at and answered:

• Awareness: Is everybody aware of you? Are you top of their minds?
• Knowledge: What do people know about you? Are they aware of your full range?
• Liking: Would people consider you? Do you meet their needs? Do they believe in your products? Is your service good? Are you easy to work with?
• Preference/conviction/adoption: Are you a company that people want to deal with? Does your brand image compliment the product you offer? Does the offer have sufficient value to justify the price? What are the barriers to purchase?

Brand auditing market research should be carried out to: increase customer understanding of your brand which, as a result, should equate to repeat purchases and greater word-of-mouth advertising; knock down barriers to purchasing; improve supplier relations and enhance internal communications which, in turn, could have a knock-on effect to employee motivation.

To conduct brand auditing market research, we would first of all hold a briefing and immersion session with our client so that we can understand more about their brand. We would then carry out an initial exploratory stage with internal staff and suppliers – this would be done qualitatively through in-depth and open interviews – to help develop and effective questionnaire for customers and prospects. Thirdly, a survey of customers and prospects will employ a semi-structured questionnaire with sufficient numbers to develop a robust base that can be monitored over time and to cover all key sectors. This process will help a company track their brand. 

DJS Research has a proven track record of effectively carrying our branding research. For example, one of our clients manufactures the chemicals which are used in PU insulation and they wanted to understand the role that brand had to play when deciding which supplier to use for insulated boards – they were considering changing the brand name of one of their products.

The research we conducted focused on architects, builders, merchants, property developers, housing associations and insulation installers and distributers, and included both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

In total, 485 telephone interviews were conducted for the quantitative phase. The research found that brand usage was often driven by 'safety first' purchasing and thus conservatively relied on known brands – changing the brand name would therefore be a bad decision. The research assessed the perception of a number of key brands and provided a strategic framework to allow our client to understand the strength of brands it worked with versus others.