COVID-19 has dramatically altered the ways consumers favour and choose brands. Brands that have reassessed their growth levers, becoming more digital, local, and human-centric for example, have been able to grow exponentially.
In such a dynamic context, the excuses for neglecting strategy can lead to severe damage for the business. We see more often that traditional approaches fall short on capturing low signals to identify valuable growth levers, such as behavior and attitude changes.
Matthew Dodd, managing partner at Kantar Analytics gives you five useful tips, when building a stable brand, strong enough to handle every crisis. The Kantar analytics team has developed an approach that enables marketers to identify brand growth levers in a granular way, building on emerging trends and allowing brands to differentiate themselves to adapt and stay competitive in this ever-changing new landscape.
Hi Matthew,
In your upcoming webinar you are going to talk about how to manage your brand with data-analytics. Why should the brand be top on the agenda during uncertain times?
- “For businesses, having the right strategy and be ready with a robust framework of data, is key to stay relevant and in order to be agile in times of uncertainty. During the pandemic behaviour and attitudes were changing fast. Brands that managed to stay relevant, different from their competitors and meaningful for their consumers, grew much faster than their competitors during the pandemic. Brand Equity is highly connected to business performance.” Analytics is about what is important and what’s not, turning data into insight.
Ok, so what is Brand Equity?
- Brand equity is the core of your brand's strength. Whether it's bright or tough times, strong brands are winning. In bright times, strong brands grow faster; in tough times, they recover faster. We compared data in the world's largest brand study BrandZ from two different crises - the recession of 2008 and the current pandemic. Apart from the fact that the world looked completely different then, the comparison can be used as a valuable guide. We can see those brands after the financial crisis in 2008 recovered almost three times faster in two years. Even in the past year, strong brands have, despite an uncertain situation, escaped the worst parts of the crisis and grown stronger.
So, knowing your brands value is as important for businesses as financial insights. How does these brand insights help brand owners navigate in their decision making?
- During fast changing times it is crucial to make the brand relevant to consumers right where they are. Combining different sets of data sources enables more agile ways of working and fast learning on what to focus on, and what not to focus on. Marketers and brand owners use brand equity metrics to measure both long- and short term effects on the brand. Understanding what the brand can do for your business performance also pushes the whole organisation closer to the consumer, making it consumer centric, and help you understand where your brand and category fits in people’s lives - what the brand means to consumers.
Alright, but a lot of businesses already invest in customer experience KPI:s such as NPS for one example. Isn’t that enough? Don’t marketers have enough data already?
- Many brand owners think they have too much data and they find it difficult to get insights from it. NPS is crucial to know how your customers relate to the brand but doesn’t give a holistic view. It doesn’t answerer why distractors distract or why promoters promote. Setting up a consistent framework for analytics of the brands total performance gives you insights for example about how the brand delivers on customer expectations. Moreover, you get insight about the brands performance in comparison with your competitors. It’s about fusing data together to maximise value.
Do you have any recipes for success in terms of managing your brand?
- Ask the right questions.
- Use the tools to see where consumers are right now.
- Use a variety of sources.
- Be consistent over time with a plan on what to measure.
- Build a holistic view of the brand, today and tomorrow. But keep it simple.
