Bringing Science to the Art
Alongside the art of building brands and making creative decisions, there’s an opportunity for a more scientific, rigorous understanding of sound brand strategy. In particular, clients often ask how they can reduce uncertainty before pursuing a new or revised brand strategy? Brand is ultimately an intangible asset – the sum of experiences that consumers have with a brand in the marketplace – so how can we increase confidence that a specific strategic direction will serve the business and drive positive financial results?
While elements of brand strategy can feel like an art, the best brand strategies tend to have quite a bit of science behind them . There are a variety of quantitative tools that can help us uncover insights that lead to more confident, data-backed strategy decisions and can reduce risk in brand-building efforts.
Let’s look at three of these tools and how we use them at HawkPartners to support brand strategy.
Tool 1: Pathway Analysis to Evaluate Brand Positioning Effectiveness
Pathway Analysis is an advancement on traditional regression that allows us to look more comprehensively (and simultaneously) at relationships among many brand drivers. In a brand strategy context, we can use this approach to empirically evaluate how both higher order elements and functional benefits of a brand positioning work together, and are connected in consumers’ minds, to drive a desired impact (e.g., purchase intent, customer retention, NPS).
This type of analysis helped a major Korean phone manufacturer understand which higher order emotions they should attempt to anchor on in consumers’ minds, given the functional benefits that each phone brand in their portfolio could deliver.
Tool 2: Choice Modeling to Quantify Brand Architecture Decisions
Discrete Choice Modeling (DCM) is a technique for quantifying the likely adoption of various brand and product concepts, including measuring the combined impact of multiple varying elements of a specific offer. In the context of brand architecture decision-making, DCM allows us to isolate the impact of a variety of different potential brand architecture options through a market demand simulator that indicates the specific impact on demand for each combination of brand architecture choices.
A premier American home security provider used a DCM model to determine the impact of potential sub-brands on driving overall demand for the business – and ultimately decided that the incremental lift in demand driven by these sub-brands was not worth the increased investment that would be required to operate them.
Tool 3: Demand Landscapes to Find “Swim Lanes” for Brands
When a company’s portfolio includes several brands within the same or similar categories, it can be a challenge to determine which brands are complementing each other and which may inadvertently be competing and/or cannibalizing each other’s businesses. Demand Landscapes provide an approach that can help clarify brand portfolio strategy by creating a multi-dimensional market map that illustrates how moments of brand consumption intersect with consumer segments to create marketplace opportunities.
In particular, Demand Landscapes allow us to understand specifically where and when cannibalization happens, at both the granular segment and consumption moment level, while also identifying where there might be white spaces or underserved segments or consumption moments that can be addressed in a more complementary fashion by each brand.
A leading snack company used a Demand Landscape to deploy its full portfolio of brands, giving each brand a separately defined, laser-focused strategy to show up and win in new and unique spaces while avoiding internal competition for specific occasions. Among other uses, our client leveraged the work to inform their innovation, marketing, and channel strategies to help gain share in the highly competitive snacking landscape. We continue to augment the work each year, sizing the market to stay on top of the shifting landscape and how brands are re-positioning themselves.
Confidence in Brand Strategy
If you’re facing brand strategy challenges related to positioning, brand architecture, or portfolio decisions like many of our clients, leveraging these analytic tools can provide greater conviction for any strategic path forward.