What is driving brand value in your market? – published by Quirk’s

Most brands rely on a brand tracker to monitor brand health and competitors over time. While these trackers can lead to insights about how trends affect your brand and your competitors, they usually explain very little about causality: how and why a brand shifts positions over time.

To better understand brand health, marketing researchers can turn to brand driver analysis to extract more strategic insight from tracking data that your company has already collected.

Published on Quirk’s, our Senior VP Americas, Juan, covers a framework marketing researchers can apply to better understand why and how a brand gains or loses ground in the marketplace; define what should be strategic points of difference and points of parity for your brand; and identify potential white-space brand identity opportunities in the market.

What is driving brand value in your market? – Structuring the framework

“The brand driver framework includes six main steps:

1. Define the key brand equity statements or attributes.
2. Define an overall brand health metric correlated with sales, which will be explained by the rest of the brand equity attributes.
3. Quantify relationships between attributes and the key brand health metric.
4. Quantify brand equity ownership vis-a-vis competition.
5. Build visual ladders combining the information above.
6. Simulate potential gains in brand positioning as a function of improving brand performance on key equity attributes.

The first step in this framework is to identify the brand equity attributes that collectively describe the dynamics of the category and the positioning of all brands in the market.

To capture a broad spectrum of the market, a set of attributes that may number as high as 80 are tested in a brand tracker (more would be a burden for respondents). Ordinarily, many of these attributes are highly correlated and can be clustered into 15 to 25 consumer underlying dimensions, which can then be assembled into a hierarchical model.

Constructs at the bottom level tend to include more functional performance-related variables such as reliability, portability, product quality, ease of use and fair price. These subsequently drive other constructs found at a higher level which are more emotional and/or holistic in nature, such as customer service, product performance and value for money…”