Brand research
Brand strategy needs research
When you’re managing a brand, research plays a vital part in your strategy cycle.
Conducting thorough research is often complicated, but understanding and acting upon the results, doesn’t have to be.
As strategists, we help you implement the insights, quickly and efficiently, in the most cost-effective way possible, to help your brand achieve the goals you set.
Working together
Consider us an extension of your team. We work with you and your people, throughout the journey, collaborating seamlessly to help you maximise your brand equity and get the results you need.
We can help you with:
Brand codes:
Understanding your brands perception and what makes it unique, amongst your audience, is critical.
We help you bake distinctiveness into your brand and advertising through co-creation, refinement, and testing of brand codes.
Brand targeting:
Using the best research techniques, we’ll help you segment your marketplace before presenting you with intimate target audience profiles.
Knowing your customer fully enables you to allocate your budget forensically, so you reach exactly the right people at scale.
Brand positioning and proposition:
What makes you stand out? How do you want to be remembered? What is the optimum physical and metal availability for your brand?
We use market analysis, audience profiling, and brand mapping to answer these questions.
Brand diagnosis and audits:
Proper strategy removes assumptions from the planning. This is where most marketing teams focus their attention, especially when launching a product or service. Give yourself adequate time to plan the research so that it effectively informs your strategy; at least 2 months before your brand strategy work begins.The brand diagnosis or audit stage gives you insights you can use across your strategy.
Brand objectives:
We use market analysis x brand mapping to understand what you want to achieve next year and beyond. These will help you to set KPIs for future brand tracking.
Brand architecture:
We’ll help you organise the framework so you can manage the relationship between your master brand and the other brands, products, or services that exist.
Tactical execution:
Understanding your audience segments and how best to reach them with the right messages is crucial in campaigning. Getting the balance right between your mass market brand building plan and targeted sales activation.
Brand tracking:
Helps you monitor how strong your brand salience is and how effectively your brand strategy is working.
Regular surveys with your target audience answer all questions around impact, cut through, sales effectiveness, and brand recommendation.
Brand architecture:
We’ll help you organise the framework so you can manage the relationship between your master brand and the other brands, products, or services that exist.
The MindField approach:
We do brand research different to others, because we are not your bog standard advertising and research agency. We have skills and expertise in behavioural science. Why should you care? Because people do not experience brands in a sterile and formal environment…..
Couple this with having some of the best brand strategy minds in the business makes us a powerful team to have on your side.
How we work:
We start with your brief to fully understand your ultimate aim and strategic objectives. from this. The journey starts with research, and the package we recommend is determined by your needs, what existing insights you have, timings and your budget.
What does perfect brand equity look like for you? what is the brand’s north star? What objectives have you set for it? What does success look like? We will work with you to set some goals and KPIs that can be used to measure success. This means we continue to learn and improve month on month and year on year.
An initial review of existing or secondary data on your audience, topic and industry means we start from an informed position. From here we identify the gaps in our knowledge. What more do we need to know about your audience, their lives, their behaviours and attitudes that are relevant to your industry, brand or product.
We use the principles of behavioural science to design our research approaches to understand how people really behave and think, we never rely solely on what people say they do. People are poor witnesses of their own behaviour. We are experts in applied behavioural theory such as unconscious bias, heurists and social incentivisation.
Our research is always bespoke and we use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to get to the insight we need.
Our methodology mix:
- Community Panels
- Digital Immersions
- Depth Interviews
- Focus Groups
- Accompanied Shops
- Intercept Interviews
- Ethnography
- Usage and Attitude Surveys
- Brand and comms tracking surveys
- Observation
- Filmed Observation
- Customer Closeness
- Ideation and Co-Creation Workshops
- Creative optimisation and test surveys
- Segmentation and profiling surveys
- Kantar, Nielson and Mintel data analysis
Research Director
Joanna Brown
Jo is a behavioural science and behaviour change expert. She leads the MindField research team and ensures our work across Research, Strategy, Creative, Digital and Media is supported by a strong understanding of humans. Jo has a mini MBA in brand management. She has a passion and a skill for brand strategy, keeping up to date with all the latest thinking. She understands what it takes to make a brand a success and will work with you as your strategic brand research partner.
She works in partnership with clients to take insight into their strategies across brand, marketing, comms and product/service development.
Jo began her Research career 26 years ago and has worked across industries including global brands, grocery, FMCG, fashion, events, leisure, motor, media, health, public sector, education, housing.
Senior Research Manager
Hannah Tales
Hannah is an accomplished dual-skilled researcher with a proven track record of leading clients to success.
Her degree in Psychology enables her to ground both qual and quant insight in understanding consumer needs, attitudes and behaviours.
Hannah is brand tracking expert. She designs bespoke tracking surveys, including fully customised brand funnels. She will ensure your initial brand diagnosis or audit sets the right KPIs, and then tracks them to identity successes and areas of weakness.
Research Manager
Hannah Abraham
Hannah is a naturally curious and inquisitive researcher.
Hannah has a skill for understanding behaviours when it comes to brands. She particularly enjoys exploring the differences in people’s experiences, influences and perceptions.
Hannah is an engaging and analytical moderator and is highly experienced in managing research projects – ensuring smooth running of the whole process.
Our brand research clients:
Recent brand research work:
4th Arq
4TH ARQ are successful in Ireland and are now planning UK expansion. Their customers love their products, but what is the brand’s magic sauce? And how can it be used to build the brand in the UK?
Brand research was used to help 4th Arq see how to build a brand that stands the test of time across UK and Ireland. We used qualitative depth of understanding and quantitative robust data to uncover the decision-making process, brand funnel, brand perceptions and competitor analysis for Ireland. UK category shopper data was used to start to understand this market. Brand research for UK is planned for later in the year.
We uncovered 4TH ARQ “magic sauce”, how it can be harnessed in the UK, and white space opportunities.
4TH ARQ has strong brand equity in Ireland; It’s a “must-have”, earning its right to be the most-wanted by meeting functional and emotional consumer needs better than their competitors. This will be key to their UK strategy .
The 4TH ARQ team felt a deeper understanding of their audience, and thus inspired a fresh-perspective of where to focus their strategy in Ireland; as well as spring-boarding ideas for their UK strategy.
Nimah, Head of Brand at 4TH ARQ:
“It was a great debrief, insightful findings that I know will strengthen our strategy for both markets moving forward.
The brain was in overdrive!”
The Light Leeds
Make The Light the number one entertainment spot in Leeds.
Brand awareness plus positive brand association is what creates brand equity. When a brand has equity, it means it’s top of mind for consumers and it’s a brand they want to use. This is what The Light needs.
We conducted a brand usage and attitude survey to understand awareness levels and brand associations for The Light and all key competitors. Quotas on those who live in the city centre, those who work there and those who visit for leisure enabled us to see where the key opportunities are for each cohort.
Awareness of The Light is good, but so is awareness of its competitors. So how do we build a proposition that makes it stand out against competitors, and gives consumers something unique? We mapped key metrics by importance and performance and found that The Light’s location, sense of safety, proximity to public transport, and variety of adult-friendly options is what will set it apart.
Brand building using emotion. How do we tap into the logistical pulls of a safe, location with lots of variety and untap the emotional pull?
We hope to work with The Light to help develop their 2025 strategy that uses both brand building and sales activation comms. We’ll use the research to decide which target cohorts to include, choose the brand associations to use, build a positioning statement, set brand objectives and develop a media activation plan.