HEAVENLY BRANDING: STEP ONE
Step One on the Staircase to Heavenly Branding: Market Research
Supply and Demand is the principle that underlies all sales. Branding seeks to communicate an image of your company as a supplier who can meet your target market’s demands. Market research then becomes essential for uncovering the specific demands of your target market, the needs and desires of other markets, and in discovering the approaches and successes of your competitors in meeting these demands.
While market research sounds simply in theory, the total metrics that can be collected and analysed are almost endless. It is essential that you first focus on your existing customers if you aim to grow your customer base. Information such as purchase habits, application and web data, attitudinal research, campaign response and customer feedback first needs to be collated and amalgamated. There are then many means of analysing both the qualitative and quantitative data to spot trends, habits and areas for growth.
Your research data should strive to uncover who is buying what? What people aren’t buying, and why? When, where and from whom are they buying – you or your competition? What are your customers thinking? And what are their needs, motivations and barriers?
Once these questions have been sufficiently answered you can begin to use branding to affect a change in consumer behaviour – maximising your sales and market potential. By viewing all of your data analytics in one platform it can make planning and tracking your customer journey a lot simpler.
As well as your analysing customers, you must also analyse the marketplace. Markets are in a state of constant flux, what with sudden shifts in trends, regular development of new technologies and platforms, and breaking news hitting the business headlines on a daily basis. The geography of your market needs to be comprehensively mapped and a platform for managing and updating this information needs to be installed in order to make use of ever changing market data and avoid potential pitfalls.
A way to further boost productivity and efficiency is to open this data and tracking information across you entire organisation, especially where departments are quite disconnected from one another. Common knowledge makes for common aims, helping keep your organisation close-knit with this common thread.
By conducting this kind of market research, and by keeping it up-to-date, you can gain a huge amount of insight into your market, areas for improvement and growth, and solid background data on which to start planning your brand image. Next month we will be looking at how you as an organisation can go on a journey of self-discovery, helping you to take stock, plan your branding, and emerge enlightened and full of confidence – and you don’t even have to go to a cave in the foothills of the Himalayas!
For more information on anything discussed in this article, or to see how the Thread process can help you implement any of the ideas, why not contact us today?