Brand Consulting
A brand is a set of ideas, images, and emotions about a product or service that is planted, nourished, and cultivated within the human mind.
Brand Strategy (or Branding Strategy) is the art and science of defining an optimal set of ideas, concepts, images, symbols, and human feelings about a brand's product or service and attaching them to that brand in a powerful, compelling, and enduring way.
There are winning strategies and marketing initiatives for virtually every brand, if objective, accurate, trustworthy information is the basis of those strategies and initiatives. Brand growth can be driven by an understanding of cause and effect, based on scientific principles, experiments, unbiased research, analytic expertise, and marketing knowledge.
In helping a brand build long-term market share, Decision Analyst uses a variety of research techniques, experimental designs, analytic methods, and consulting processes. A typical consulting engagement would likely include some of the following components:
- Alignment meetings with key brand stakeholders (before the start of any work) to cover brand history, brand facts, brand aspirations, and brand vision. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) would be a part of this upfront preparation.
- Review of all brand-relevant research data in the client’s possession. (previous qualitative research, ATUs, segmentation studies, package design tests, advertising tests, syndicated data, etc.).
- Secondary research on a brand’s history, advertising, and marketing trends, compared to the same types of data for major competitive brands, including private label brands.
- Depth interviews among brand loyalists, heavy users, medium users, light users, and competitive brand users in order to build category and brand knowledge and to begin to develop hypotheses about brand growth opportunities. Non-users of the product category would also be interviewed to explore market expansion possibilities. The results would be used to develop branding strategy hypotheses and possibilities.
- A Brand Architecture Survey to precisely measure the existing brand images and brand equities for the subject brand and major competitive brands. Such a study should be repeated every three- to five-years to provide a foundation for strategy development and evolution.
- Strategy Concept Testing among a broadly defined target audience for the brand, with readable samples of important market segments, to identify winning brand strategies.
- A Market Structure Study to profile the overall market, channels of distribution, market shares, product usage, demographic patterns, etc. A study of this type is typically repeated on a three- to five-year cycle to provide a basis for marketing, distribution, and new product planning.
- Consulting to assist with the optimization and implementation of brand growth strategies.
- Brand tracking to monitor the brand’s progress toward the achievement of its marketing and growth goals.
Brand Consulting Services
Decision Analyst has over 45 years of experience in brand research, brand consulting, brand planning, and brand strategy. If you would like more information on branding research, please contact Jerry W. Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, by emailing him at jthomas@decisionanalyst.com, or by calling 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.