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What kind of companies are the best fit for BrandSequencing?
Why is "in-depth" research so important? How can you effectively deal with "intangibles" like brand personality? We don't have a big marketing budget. How can we justify research?
What kind of companies are the best fit for BrandSequencing? - We work mainly with B2C companies, but not exclusively. In determining fit, we look for some (but not necessarily all) of the following factors: an established customer base; openness to research and structured inquiry; staff dedicated to sales and marketing; enough marketing resources to execute on strategy effectively; and ability to effect internal change. Why is "in-depth" research so important? - The most important issues to customers are often unconscious, that is, they're not even aware that they feel a certain way about your product until these feelings are elicited by a skilled interviewer in an in-depth interview situation. Customers also need a certain amount of time to build trust with an interviewer before they feel comfortable enough to reveal themselves, even unconsciously, and in-depth interviewing is structured along this time frame. How can you effectively deal with "intangibles" like brand personality? Thinking of something like "brand personality" as an "intangible" is natural for most people in business because there's no clear commonly shared definition of what a brand really is. For that matter, we're not sure that science has come up with a good working theory of personality. We don't deal with "intangibles." Our research is focused on things that customers really feel and think, and we make them concrete, measurable, and tangible. Isn't branding mainly an intuitive thing? Our CEO likes to do all himself. How can research help us with our brand? Intuitive insights can be misleading, and can easily become accepted "facts", especially when they come from charismatic leaders. Gifted intuitive innovators are wrong as often as they are right, and can fail in communicating their brilliant innovations to an uncomprehending world. Brands are mostly inhabitants of customers' minds, and in order to understand them you need to research these minds in an objective way. Indeed, many of the most important customer research findings are "counter-intuitive" and go against assumptions. How do you work with startups? - Being located in the Bay area, we get asked this question often. While customer research is usually best accomplished when there are actual customers to research, we can work with startups when there are relevant category-based issues to explore. For instance, online services providers are operating in a particularly volatile product category environment. Research for these kinds of companies is based on how customers feel about the category in general, in order to make specific recommendations about new product introductions, promotions, or positioning. We don't have a big marketing budget. How can we justify research? - Our solutions can scale according to the needs of many medium and small businesses, and are priced using percentage of marketing budgets as an indicator. Our main value proposition is that by a proportionately modest investment in research, you'll see a much greater return on marketing investment because you're targeting customers with messaging that's based on empirically validated data, rather than on intuition and guesswork, like most marketing. |
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