You’d be hard pressed to find a single category with only one brand. That means from day one, you’ll always be asking, “Do we have a strong brand?”

Brand health tracking studies answer this very question. By uncovering a variety of dimensions—awareness, perceptions, and usage—these studies give you an objective view of how you stack up against the competition.

Why Track Brand Health

When you track brand health, you gauge not just where your brand stands today but also where you may stand in the future. Because brand health is a leading indicator of future performance, it tells organizations if they should stay the course or develop new approaches.

In particular, brand health tracking tells you:

• • How well people know your brand
• • How relevant your brand is
• • How your brand is perceived
• • When and why people use your brand

When you include other brands in your brand health tracking, you learn:

• • If competitors are gaining / losing advantages
• • How campaign or advertising spend impacts market behavior
• • If there are evolutions in product or brand use cases

Top Metrics To Capture In A Brand Health Study

There is no one size fits all approach to brand health tracking studies. After all, what’s relevant for a consumer good brand is very different than what’s relevant for an enterprise software brand. As a result, studies must have some customization to adapt to the business context.

Nevertheless, there are a series of metrics that tend to be in all brand health studies.

Who To Survey In Your Brand Health & Awareness Tracking

Once you know what to include in your brand health and awareness tracking, it’s time to begin collecting data to see how you stack up. This means collecting responses from relevant individuals.

What does that look like in practice? We suggest keeping in mind two things when moving into data collection:

1. Surveying The Right People. You only want to survey people who would have a chance of actually knowing about you or competitors. As a result, consider the demographic, psychographic, and product usage criteria that make someone a viable customer. And, in the case of B2B brands, include firmographics too. Only people with those backgrounds should be in your study.

2. Respondent Sample Size: Brand tracking measures changes in health and perceptions over time. This means you want confidence that changes are due to actual market or customer evolutions. Getting enough people in your study builds this confidence by minimizing the natural sampling error that comes from surveying a portion of a given population.

In essence, plan your data collection to get enough of the right people in your study to be confident about point-in-time and longitudinal data.

What To Do With Brand Health Data

Think of brand health data as the launchpad for your subsequent product, marketing, and business strategy. The information you uncover is foundational for understanding your brand strength and product relevance, and therefore what needs to change to build or maintain momentum.

For instance, if you find that brand awareness lags behind the competition, it’s possibly time to consider marketing and advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, if you find that product use cases do not align with your product’s full potential, there’s likely a product marketing opportunity at play.

In essence, brand health studies don’t just give you a point-in-time read on your brand’s strength. They also guide business and product roadmap planning so you allocate your resources to the right activities.

Pricing a product or service is really hard. For some, it’s one of the hardest components of any go-to-market plan. Understandably so.

Price a product too high and you risk customer alienation. Price a product too low and you leave money on the table. But, if you find the sweet spot, you maximize revenue and customer acquisition.

How do you find that sweet spot? By using price elasticity research. Also called the Gabor Granger method, price elasticity research gives you an objective read on how sensitive customers are to price and therefore just how much you can really charge.

What Is The Gabor Granger Pricing Model

Developed in the 1960’s by economists André Gabor and Clive Granger, the Gabor Granger model measures the price elasticity for different products or services. Said more simply, it lets you see how much or little customers react to a change in a product or service’s price.

This idea of elasticity is crucial when it comes to determining price points. When price is elastic it means that even small changes in price result in major increases or decreases in customer demand. In contrast, when price is inelastic it means changing price has little change in customer behavior. By understanding how price changes behavior, you know how much liberty you have to increase price.

Because Gabor Granger centers on assessing price elasticity, it is ideal when you have the following goals:

• Determine how much customers are willing to pay for a product or service
• Optimize a product or service’s profitability

Notably, Gabor Granger only focuses on price point. That is, we have no interest in determining how changes in other dimensions like features, functionality, or other factors impact willingness to pay. If that’s not the case, there are other methods better suited to measuring customer demand.

How Gabor Granger Helps Maximize Profit

Unlike other pricing approaches, Gabor Granger is notable for its ability to help companies maximize profit by assessing customers’ willingness to pay.

For instance, the cost-plus pricing approach is based off of a product or service’s cost. Companies assess the cost of delivering a product or service. They then apply a fixed mark up. Sure, they make a profit. But, if customers are willing to pay a higher mark up, these companies leave money on the table.

Another example is using competitive pricing. Under this approach, companies use standard pricing that already exists to determine their price point. However, competitors may use the cost-plus approach. Or, their products or services may not offer the same benefits. If either of these are true, companies will once again leave money on the table if they just use this approach.

In contrast, as we’ll see below, Gabor Granger used feedback to directly from customers to pinpoint what they are willing to pay. And, where they are unwilling to pay. This direct intel from customers is key for revenue maximization.

How Gabor Granger Works

The Gabor Granger research approach uses a sequential series of pricing questions to identify any given respondent’s preferred price point.

To begin with, you’ll need to determine the pricing levels you want to test. For instance, for high-value items like washers or dryers, you may want to use price points in $50-$100 increments. Meanwhile, for everyday consumer goods you may want price points that change in $.50 or $1.00 increments.

From there, respondents will see a description of the product. Via a survey they will be asked:

“How likely are you to buy this product at [ENTER PRICE]?”

1. Extremely likely
2. Very likely
3. Somewhat likely
4. Not so likely
5. Not at all likely

Intel Gained From Gabor Granger Price Elasticity

Once data is fully collected across all respondents, we start understanding how customers truly react to changes in price.

Brand awareness directly ties to revenue. Consider a recent study that showed repeated brand advertising results in 23% revenue growth. This is because the more people know a brand, the more they are likely to buy it. Additionally, brand awareness also has positive impacts on customer lifetime values (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

It’s a powerful tool companies have in their arsenal, if they are willing to invest in growing their brand in the first place.

This is why organizations focus on measuring brand awareness. It provides an objective measure of how well branding efforts are working. And, it also provides a valuable “canary in the coal mine” to tell you when to step up or evolve your brand strategies.

What Is Brand Awareness

Brand awareness tells you how well known your brand is among relevant customer groups. It’s an objective way to evaluate how strong your brand and competitor brands are within a specific product or service category.

Companies engage in a wide variety of marketing tactics to build overall brand awareness, including:

• Online display ads
• Outdoor advertising
• Print advertising
• Conference and event sponsorships
• Email marketing
• Social media advertising

In essence, there are a lot of ways to potentially build brand awareness. But, an organization must spend the time to actually measure awareness to determine if their tactics are effective.

Why Measure Brand Awareness

Organizations should measure brand awareness to benchmark their market position, evaluate the efficacy of their marketing activities, and identify emerging players in their category.

Let’s look at these each a bit further.

1. Gauge Your Market Position

Business guru Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed.” Business that claim to care about brand awareness must actually spend time measuring it. It tells you exactly what your market position is and your opportunity for improvement. Relatedly, it gives you a read on how competitors rank as well.

2. Measure Marketing Efficacy 

As we mentioned above, marketing is often geared toward building a brand’s awareness. If you plan to make major marketing investments, you should make a point of knowing early on if they are working. By measuring awareness before and after campaigns, you measure exactly how awareness changes over time. If numbers trend well, keep doing what you’re doing. If you see no improvement, or decreases, try a new approach.

3. Identify Emerging Competitors

New competitors pop up all the time. So much so that it’s hard to keep track of all of them. However, by actively measuring the awareness of not just your brand but competitor brands, you have a proactive approach to identifying these upstarts.

4. Evaluate If You Have A Competitive Differentiator

With some studies pointing to as much as 95% of purchase decisions being subconscious, creating a foundation for trust is key. Building brand awareness, gives you a leg up on your competition. However, if you don’t measure it, you’ll never know how you really compare.

What Brand Awareness Metrics Matter

When performing brand awareness research studies, you should always measure two types of awareness: aided and unaided awareness.

Why Unaided Brand Awareness Matters

Unaided awareness is a way to measure top-of-mind awareness. In essence, it lets you gauge how well any given customer can remember your name with zero prompts.

Measuring unaided brand awareness is a straightforward process. People are asked to name all brands they can think of in a particular category. They can name as many or as few that come to mind.

For instance, let’s say you sell sneakers. To measure unaided awareness, you ask people to name all of the sneaker brands that come to mind. Respondents get an open box to enter whatever comes to mind.

Why Aided Brand Awareness Matters

In addition to unaided awareness, we almost always ask about aided awareness too. Aided brand awareness tells us how well customers recall the name of a brand. To measure this, respondents look at a list of brand names. They then select all of the brands they recognize.

How To Measure Brand Awareness

Now that we know what we are measuring, and why we are measuring it, let’s look at how to measure brand awareness.

1. Build A Survey

Brand awareness studies are conducted via surveys. This means you must first draft your survey questions. You’ll of course include questions to measure unaided and aided brand awareness. However, you can and should include other brand health dimensions. This includes things like brand perceptions, loyalty, and use cases.

2. Program Your Survey

We typically field brand awareness surveys digitally. This means we must take our survey design and then program it into a survey platform. Once programmed, be sure to test it a few times. And, invite a few other people to test it too. This is the last chance you have to evaluate the questions and survey-taking experience.

3. Collect Your Data

You’re now ready to have people take your survey. Be sure to recruit enough individuals so that you can feel confident in your final brand awareness numbers. Our rule of thumb is to recruit enough individuals that we have no more than +8% margin of error. This means that we can be sure our numbers are within plus or minus 8% of the actual population.

4. Tabulate Your Results

Once the data is in, it’s time to tabulate it all together. At this point, you’re determining the brand awareness for you and competitor brands. This is also when you gauge how people responded to your other brand health questions.

5. Look For Trends Within Customer Segments

An optional last step is to see if your results vary by certain customer segment. For instance, you may want to if metrics changes based on a respondent’s gender, age, job title, or other feature.

Who Should Be Included In Your Brand Awareness Study

Who you survey is almost as important as how you survey them. After all, you want to make sure you’re asking about awareness from only those people who would realistically now your brand or competitor brands.

In essence, you want to only include people that have purchased or would likely purchase your product. For instance, if you are a mayonnaise brand, you only want to recruit people who purchased mayonnaise in the past year.  Or, if you sell email marketing software, you only want people who have considered or purchased email marketing solutions.

Make Brand Awareness Measurement A Recurring Activity

Once you have a process down for how to measure brand awareness for your specific organization, be sure to make it a recurring activity.

What Is A Conjoint Analysis

A conjoint analysis is a market research approach that helps you understand how people make decisions. With conjoint analyses, you can identify how people make trade-offs that impact their preferences.

In essence, it aims to replicate the real-time decisions individuals make during any purchase decision. Customers are faced with many products or services in any given category. And, each of these likely come with different features, benefits, and price points. By understanding how customers prioritize these elements, you can develop options that increase their likelihood to buy.

Business Questions Answered By Performing A Conjoint Analysis

How do you know if a conjoint analysis is right for you? When talking to prospective clients, we keep our ears open for a few key business questions. These are….

• • What features should we release?
• • What benefits are most compelling?
• • How sensitive are customers to price changes?
• • Do any features, benefits, or price points alienate customers?
• • What is the best mix of features, benefits, and price to optimize purchase interest?

If you find yourself asking these questions, especially when planning for a new product release, chances are a conjoint is worth considering.

What You Learn When Performing A Conjoint Analysis

Let’s now breakdown exactly what kind of information you’ll learn when you run a conjoint analysis. For the sake of making things tangible, we’ll pretend we have a financial services company considering launching a new payment product. We need to know how important certain features are to customer preference. Additionally, we want to understand sensitivities to changes in price and features.

How To Perform A Conjoint Analysis

Without getting too deep into the weeds, let’s walk through the standard approach for performing a conjoint analysis.

Develop List Of Features & Feature Levels

First things first, you need to determine the specific features you want to test. In the case of our financial services company, this would be things like payment periods, fees, rewards, etc. Then, you need to figure out what levels within those features you want to test. For instance, you may want to look at 10-day, 15-day, and 20-day payment periods. Or 1% versus 2% versus 3% fees.

Analyze The Results Input

Once the data is in, we can dig into learning the preference importance, preference share, and relative utility of different features and feature levels. Additionally, if sample sizes permit, we also look at findings by unique segments. This tells us if individual customer groups have different preferences and elasticities.

Alternatives To A Conjoint Analysis

A conjoint analysis is extremely powerful. But, sometimes it’s overkill.

When organizations are in the early days of developing a product or service, you may not even know what features to include. As a result, it’s far too early to dive into testing feature importance, let alone the relative utility of feature levels. Instead, you’re likely better off doing product concept tests. This “dip your toe in the water” approach offers initial validation before you get too entrenched in a product idea.

Or, you may have a list of high-level features but aren’t sure which ones truly matter. In this scenario, you’re not ready to test feature levels. You just need to understand the relative value of unique features. If you find yourself in this instance, consider a MaxDiff study instead. This approach gives you clear insight into what features customers really want, and which ones they’re comfortable leaving behind.

You can’t judge a book by its cover…but everybody does. The same applies to packaging. You may have a killer product. But, if the packaging doesn’t shine, customers just won’t buy it.

Packaging research addresses this dynamic head on. It makes different packaging ideas compete head-to-head, giving you objective benchmarks to measure how compelling each design truly is. You’ll know if it’s worth switching out existing packaging and, more importantly, if the new design helps give you a leg up on the competition.

Why Perform Packaging Research

The data on how quickly consumers make purchase decisions is sobering. According to Nielsen, the average customer spends just 13 seconds purchasing a brand in store. That drops to 10 seconds for online products. This means brands have just seconds to make a great first impression.

Your packaging is that first impression. The way it looks on shelf against the rest of the competitive pack is the difference between getting noticed and getting passed by.

This is why packaging research is so important. You may think you know which package will stand out. Or maybe your CEO is certain they know which design is the best. Who is right? Maybe no one. Research lets you answer that question objectively, using responses from actual consumers to make critical business decisions.

The Package Optimization Research Process

We’re going to make a (perhaps incorrect) assumption that you understand your customer base and your competitive market. As a result, you’re going into the package design development process with information to inform designs that could resonate with your customers. This leaves you in a position to ask, “Which of these creative directions should I launch?”

There are two distinct steps we suggest you take. The first offers reads on a particular package itself. The second lets you see how specific packaging performs within a more realistic context.

Getting The Initial Upfront Read

Your team is likely starting out with 10 or so different directions all together. You need something that will let you quickly weed out the good from the bad. This “something” is usually a fairly straightforward online survey to collect high-level information about each package design.

Research participants will be shown each package, and asked the same series of 7-8 questions about it. The typical dimensions that almost always make the cut are…

• • Purchase Interest
• • Relevance To The Respondent
• • Ease Of Understanding
• • Uniqueness
• • Alignment With Brand
• • Trustworthiness

By capturing these inputs for each and every package, we immediately see if any designs under-perform in any key area. Additionally, by aggregating the results together, we produce a performance score for each design. This allows for a simple best-to-worst ranking.

When you complete this process, you’re not left guessing which of the designs are the duds. Instead, you have clear numbers to help remove at least half of the package designs from the consideration set.

Seeing Packaging Perform In A Real Setting

Now that you whittled down the designs to the top two or three, it’s time to home in on the creative you will launch. At this point, we have a few different approaches we use to support that final selection.

On-Shelf Simulations

One of our most common go-to options for package creative testing is on-shelf simulations. This aims to replicate the offline experience of going to a store, seeing many different brands at different price points, and selecting just one option.

By seeing how customers choose products in dense retail environments, you’ll determine if your new packaging really lets you stand out.

Conjoint Studies

Do you need to know if your new packaging, along with pricing and features, gets customers to buy you over the competition? If so, a conjoint study may be the way to go.

With this type of study, you can see how impactful certain attributes, like your packaging, are to a purchase decision. Additionally, you’ll see if packaging helps overcome price sensitivity so you can raise your price points. Also, this type of work lets you see if your packaging is strong enough to help you beat out well known brands.

Eye Tracking Studies

Do you want to know what really captures peoples’ attention? If so, consider an eye tracking study. This type of study has respondents look at packaging on their home computer or phone. Via a webcam, we track and measure their gaze.

The end result is a heat map showing exactly where peoples’ eyes go. When done across packaging, you’ll see if certain packages really make a brand name stand out. Or, perhaps you’ll see that no one really looks at the brand anymore. In essence, eye tracking lets you see if the elements you want to stand out really do stand out.

Timed Exposure Recall

If you need to get key messages across in short periods of time, we suggest timed exposure recall studies. In this approach, we show a package design for a short period of time. Perhaps 2-3 seconds. Afterwards, respondents are asked to write down everything they remember about the package.

By analyzing open ended feedback across respondents, we can identify if key images, messages, or other core elements “stick” in peoples’ minds. Additionally, we can look at responses across designs to see if one particular design is “stickier.”

Picking Your Packaging Test Approach

Which package optimization research approach is right for you? It depends.

You first need to formalize the goals for your packaging. Once you know your goals, you’ll be able to select the right approach. For instance…

• • If your goal is to stand out in a crowded environment, consider an on-shelf simulation.
• • If your goal is to overcome price sensitivity or improve consideration when you’re a lesser-known brand, a conjoint is the way to go.
• • If your goal is to make sure your packaging connotes certain ideas, consider a timed exposure recall study.
• • If your goal is to see if important packaging elements are getting seen, pick an eye tracking study.

As you can see, there’s no right or wrong approach. Rather, your business and strategic goals should guide your packaging research selection.

It’s hard to make people aware of your product or service. Getting them to actually buy it may be harder. That’s why it’s so difficult when they decide not to re-buy. You spent ample time and resources acquiring them, and now you may not recoup your expenses.

If you’re starting to see more and more customers stop buying, it’s likely time for customer churn research. As a process that systemically evaluates challenges customers have with your product or service, and the reasons for no longer purchasing, customer churn research isolates key issues you must address to impact customer satisfaction.

In essence, customer churn research is a key tool to pinpoint issues across marketing, sales, and product so you can build strong customer experiences and robust lifetime values.

Customer churn reflects the number of customers that have stopped using your product in a given span of time. The most basic calculation of churn looks at the number of paying customers at the start of a given time period. It then looks at how many of those same customers are no longer paying at the end of the time period. We divide the number of lost customers by the original number of customers. We then multiply that by 100 to get our churn percentage.

When it comes to customer churn, there are two types you should keep in mind:

• Involuntary Churn: This type of churn happens when customers stop using a product due to external factors outside of their control. Think budget cuts due to a recessionary environment or business strategy shifts that result in product or division divestments.

• Voluntary Churn: This churn occurs when customers decide to stop using a product because it does not address their needs.

Involuntary churn certainly impacts business revenue. However, a single organization cannot control macro-level factors.

This is why customer churn research focuses on voluntary churn. Voluntary churn reflects a product’s inability to fulfill customer expectations. Either unreasonable expectations were created from the onset or customer needs evolved and the product did not evolve with them.

Customer churn research unearths these expectations and needs gaps, helping companies tackle voluntary churn head on.

Customer churn research centers on capturing and analyzing feedback from churned customers. While not always, it tends to leverage interview-based research approaches. This is largely because you need to explore a variety of topics in an exploratory manager. Interviews allow for open-ended questions so you can glean a wide range of feedback from participants.

Here is the standard process for performing customer churn research.

1. Identify Churned Customers

First, we need a list of churned customers. For businesses with subscription models, this means targeting individuals that recently cancelled their subscription. Meanwhile, for businesses with tangible goods, this often means going after lapsed customers or customers that have not purchased in a given span of time.

2. Tag Customers By Relevant Segment

You may want to explore if different types of customers churn for different reasons. For instance, enterprise versus mid-market customers. Or high-revenue versus mid-revenue customers. If this is the case, make sure your customer list tags each participant by these relevant segment names. This is critical for analysis later on.

3. Develop A Discussion Guide

At the heart of any interview-based project is a discussion guide. This is a structured set of questions to ask each and every participant. The guide should capture relevant information about participants as well as reflect hypotheses you have about what is leading them to churn.

4. Recruit & Perform Interviews

Once you prospective list is complete and you finalize your discussion guide, it’s time to perform your interviews. We suggest 8-10 interviews per any given segment or customer cohort. This tends to be a sweet spot for identifying recurring trends without performing an unnecessary number of interviews.

5. Analyze Your Data

Last but not least, it’s time to review the feedback captured across your interviews. When analyzing qualitative or interview data, we look for how participants respond to each question in the guide. Specifically, we look to see if there are patterns in how individuals respond. If so, that helps point to consistent trends many customers experience and, therefore, likely churn culprits.

It’s also during this stage that you want to look at feedback by customer segment. Once again, you’re looking for trends within a segment and also across segments. This tells you if churn issues are universal or more common within certain groups.

As we mentioned above, the discussion guide is the heart of customer churn research. By ensuring that the same question is asked of many respondents, the discussion guide lets us collect data points around a single topic. It’s this dynamic that lets us pinpoint trends in open ended feedback.

Of course, this begs the question, “What questions should you have in your customer churn discussion guide?” Naturally, each guide must be tailored to a specific business category or context. Nevertheless, there are certain types of questions we suggest including:

• Churn Reasons: This should sound obvious be don’t be afraid to overtly ask what lead a customer to stop using you in the first place.
• Actual Experiences Vs. Expectations: Include questions that identify the original reasons people purchased and then how well the product executed on their expectations.
• Desired Features: Evaluate if customers want incremental features or benefits that you don’t offer. This is different that misaligned expectations as it captures potential evolutions in customer needs.
• Competitive Alternatives: Explore if customers are using a competitive product in place of yours. And, if so, why they made that switch.
• Pricing: Include questions about price point and pricing model perceptions.
• Customer Support: Ask question about customer support—phone reps, live chat, knowledge bases—to see if customers receive timely responses to their questions.
• Post-Sales Experience / Onboarding: Where relevant, explore the experience (or lack thereof) that customers had just after the deal closed.

To re-iterate, this is not a comprehensive list. Rather, it serves as the foundation for questions you should include in your discussion guide. If you want a broader list, check out this earlier post.

We recognize that reviewing customer churn research is hard. It may show unpleasant details about your business. But, that’s also the good news. It uncovers tangible things that an organization can change to improve customer experiences and build customer retention.

For instance, if experiences do not meet expectations, it’s time to look at your marketing messaging and sales processes to see if you are promising things that you cannot deliver. Relatedly, the feedback may point to product issues that are ripe for engineering or R&D attention.

You may also uncover issues with the post sales experience. Perhaps customers do not have access to high quality support, or perhaps they need more guidance to complete their ramp up. These are great opportunities for customer service or customer success team interventions.

Essentially, think of customer churn research as an incredible opportunity your organization has to build revenue. You’re already doing a great job attracting and closing customers. Once you know why they’re leaving, you’ll be able to fix the problems and do a great job of retaining them too.

How do you get a buyer from Point A to Point B? We bet there are a whole lot of things you think you can do. But, which of those is actually worth doing?

Ask some questions to find out!

Customer journey map research lets you visualize the unique steps users take when engaging with a product, service, or business. It puts you in the customer’s shoes during key stages, starting from their earliest moments with your business to when they decide to buy.

When you accurately know how buyers engage, you have the intel needed to effectively move them in the right direction.

A customer journey map is a visual representation showing the stages buyers take when engaging with a product, service, or business, and their actions and perceptions during each stage.

Often, this covers the buyer journey, or they typical process individuals take to make an initial purchase. However, a customer journey map covers any type of user flow. This could include the process for engaging with customer service. Or, it could cover the typical churn process. If the process has unique stages and unique customer behaviors in each stage, you can likely create a journey map for it.

Businesses develop customer journey maps to identify where and how to effectively influence customer decisions. Let’s take a look at just a few of the major factors that journey maps impact:

• • Marketing Channels: Journey maps tell you where customers learn about you and what external factors influence their decisions. This knowledge informations which marketing activities an organization chooses.
• • Marketing Collateral / Materials: Relatedly, journey maps tell you what information users look for during key experience stages. This equips businesses to develop the right mix of marketing collateral or other influencing materials for each stage.
• • Personnel Resourcing: When you develop a journey map, you see who customers engage with to make a decision. This tells you if frontline sales staff, customer support reps, or other personnel are needed to create positive experiences.
• • Budget: Businesses need to know how much money to set aside for marketing and sales. When you use customer journey maps to isolate channels, marketing materials, and personnel, you also gather the information needed to build budgets.
• • Forecasting: Part of journey mapping includes assessing the amount of time users spend during journey stages. This informs revenue and customer acquisition forecasting activities.

Could you sit in a room with colleagues and create a generic customer journey map? Sure, you could. However, it would likely be fairly shallow. And, it would be fueled by internal anecdotes rather that customer feedback. This means you will miss key steps or inputs that yield effective, actionable maps.

Instead, let’s go through the process of developing data-informed customer journey maps.

We know that any journey begins with an initial awareness stage, often triggered by a key event or need. From there, customers go through a series of additional stages to explore, evaluate, and ultimately decide on a final product or service. Our framework above covers most B2B contexts as well as several B2C contexts. However, this approach is likely too generic for certain business environments.

For instance, if we’re researching enterprise-oriented products, we likely need stages to explore the procurement, quoting, and negotiation process. Meanwhile, if our client is a B2B SaaS provider, we likely need to include pricing plan exploration as a standalone stage.

Essentially, be prepared to adapt the framework to your specific business context. As we’ll discuss below, you can use research to evaluate exactly which stages you should include.

A lot happens within each stage. That’s why the framework breaks out a wide variety of dynamics that must be understood about each stage. It’s the clarity we need to truly understand the buyer experience.

These are just a few of the dynamics we generally explore during our customer journey map research:

• • Persona Profile: We need to know who the key stakeholder is at each stage in the journey, or if there are multiple stakeholders. Depending on the business context, this is often a mixture of demographic, psychographic, and professional details.
• • State Of Mind: Getting into the heads of our customers helps us understand their everyday circumstances and empathize with them at each step of they way.
• • Challenges / Pain points: We need to know the tangible problems customers must solve. These often evolve throughout the journey so be prepared to explore them throughout the process.
• • Important Touch Points: This captures if there are key places, people, or things that our personas use to inform their decisions.
• • Necessary Inputs: Information gathering is a key part of the buyer journey. Mapping out what customers learn during each stage helps you identify what questions you must answer, and when.
• • Timing: Ideally, we have a strong grasp of how long customers take during each stage in the journey. This helps manage internal expectations about how long it takes to move people through the funnel.

Just like the journey stages, these dynamics may need adjustments for your specific business context

Once you have a grasp for the journey map itself, and what inputs it needs, it’s time to actually fill it out. This is where market research comes in.

Because journey maps tend to be exploratory work, we typically leverage one-to-one customer research to complete these projects. That is, we use intentionally open-ended questions to explore and validate the the framework stages as well as the dynamics within each stage.

Using a structured discussion guide, we’ll have customers take us through their journey. By asking about a diverse range of topics—what triggered them to explore the category in the first place, what resources they used to evaluate the solution, who they turned to for a second opinion—we capture the information needed to build these maps.

As we complete the interviews, we listen for repeated trends across participants. With enough interviews, patterns emerge that give us confidence to fill in those journey map squares.

A customer journey map covers one discrete stage in the user’s experience with a product or service. However, as we alluded to above, users engage with a business under many different circumstances. As a result, their experiences flow from one circumstance to another. At some point, a new customer becomes an experienced customer. Meanwhile, key inflection points turn customers into evangelists or detractors.

Each transition point is an opportunity for an incremental customer journey map. It helps businesses visualize how users get from one stage to another. And, in doing so, it helps them drive customers toward desired outcomes.

This is why over time, you’ll want to build not just journey maps but also journey flows. These show how and when these transitions happen, empowering you once again to create positive journey experiences.

Legacy brands must work hard to stay fresh and compete in crowded categories. It isn’t enough to have once been relevant. You need to stay relevant.

Rebranding is a powerful approach to maintain relevancy. But it’s no easy feat. After all, a successful rebrand isn’t just updated logos and color schemes. It’s a broader process that includes understanding target audiences, market trends, and competitive dynamics to develop a refreshed brand that has relevance and differentiation. Getting it right means knowing what’s going on in the world, and what customers want.

Enter market research.

By gaining valuable insight into market and customer details, as well as the resonance of different brand identify and go-to-market directions, you’ll execute a rebrand process that truly lets your brand stand out from the pack.

A rebrand takes a lot of work. First, you need internal stakeholders on board with the process. Then, you need to assess what needs to be updated, and why. Lastly, the elements that make the rebrand come to life must be executed.

Why go through with this process? There are a lot of reasons.

1. Strong Brand That Needs To Freshen Up: Legacy brands have a lot of equity. But, their legacy-ness may be keeping new customers from trying them out. Dated brand elements—fonts, colors, images, claims, positioning—can stand in the way of new customer acquisition. Rebrands let brands retain existing customers while drawing new customers in. This is at the heart of the Campbell’s Soup refresh.

2. Legacy Brand That Needs Revitalization: Sometimes, a brand’s positioning results in declining sales over time. It’s association with a certain customer type, its price point, its distribution channel, or other factors may result in lagging performance. Brands that find themselves here need to reposition themselves and undergo a rebrand to kick start sales growth. The recent shift in Old Spice is a great example of this type of rebrand.

3. One Of Many Brands In A Crowded Category: As product categories mature, more and more brands come into the mix. This results in lots of brands that don’t stand apart. Going through a rebrand helps products seek targeted customers or positioning that will let them stand out from the pack. Fiji water is a great example of this process in action.

4. Brand Going Through An Identify Crisis: Think Aunt Jemima syrup or Uncle Ben’s rice. Enough said.

Sure, there are other reasons for rebrands. But, these tend to be the biggest rebrand triggers.

In the ideal world, you have unlimited time and money to do everything we just outlined above. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. As a result, most organizations need to pick and choose from this list.

How do you choose?

We always suggest asking yourself where do you have the greatest number of unknowns. If you haven’t done any work to understand the broader category landscape, let alone competitive brands, start there. On the flip side, if you have a great understanding of category dynamics, you’re likely ready to move into positioning or brand identify work. That means plugging in validation research to see if you’re moving in the right direction.

Just be sure you don’t get ahead of yourself! It’s all too tempting to jump immediately into brand identify or go-to-market efforts. But, if you don’t have a good grasp on the broader landscape, those activities likely won’t be successful.

It takes a lot to build a well-loved, revenue-driving brand. But, sometimes, brands lose their luster. Maybe they just don’t keep up with the times. Perhaps they represent outdated technology or ideals. Or, they possibly just haven’t gotten the investment needed to stay bright and shiny.

Regardless of what leads to this point, the fact remains that it drives teams to ask a critical question: Is it time to sunset the brand?

It’s a controversial question, ripe with potential discontent from long-loyal customers and influential internal stakeholders. But, it’s a critical one to ensure resources are used on the right brands.

By evaluating the broader implications of brand sunsetting on customer sentiment and competitive dynamics, organizations are well-equipped to confidently make the go / no-go decision.

Sunsetting a brand or product refers to the intentional phasing out of that item and making it no longer available for purchase. This is a deliberate choice on the part of an organization, often driven by seeing that the brand or product no longer produces enough revenue or other reputational value to justify the cost of bringing it to market.

The decision to sunset a brand often comes at key inflection points. For instance, organizations undergoing mergers or acquisitions may find that they have competing or redundant brands. Or, organizations with robust brand portfolios developed over time may see too much customer overlap across brand usage.

These inflection points are ideal times to have strategic conversations about the value, or lack thereof, of each brand to the broader organization.

With so many research options to consider, which one should you choose? The ideal answer is more than one.

Let’s look at the scenarios below to suss this out.

Low Risk / Smaller Budget…Is the brand sunsetting process relatively low risk? And, do you have limited budgets to work with? If so, you can likely get away with a landscape study. You’ll have sufficient samples sizes to build decent confidence levels and you’ll have data on different brand deprecation scenarios.

Moderate Risk / More Unknowns…Are you entering the sunsetting question with a lot of unknowns? If so, you’ll want to consider beginning with open-ended interview or focus groups followed by survey-based approaches. This one-two punch lets you identify issues not currently on your radar while adding in a validation layer.

High Risk / A Lot Of Unknowns / Deep Budget…Is brand sunsetting a risky, controversial move? And, are you equipped with the time and budget to really explore the topic? If so, start exploring the unknowns with focus groups or interviews and then follow for more exploration and validation with a survey. If sunsetting still seems a-go, finish up with additional qualitative research to explore how best to go-to-market with the sunsetting process.

Content marketing might seem all the rage. Just produce blog posts or eBooks and new customers will find you. Right? Well, not quite.

Your content marketing must actually be good! That means it must be informative and novel while (in our opinion) providing your audience something new or compelling that’s worth their time.

This is where using research to power your content marketing comes in. When you use impactful data to fuel your content engine, you produce content that isn’t just timely and relevant but also exudes authority and credibility too.

Using research findings to create content marketing lets you create unique, thought-provoking content while showing your audience that you base your perspectives on leading edge, current information.

This is key because content marketing is all about building credibility and trust with relevant prospective customers. It’s one thing to say, “we think X” or “we believe Y.” It’s another thing entirely to point to concrete quotes or metrics as a foundation.

When you use data to support your arguments, you are naturally more compelling. And, you’re providing your audience with novel information they can’t get elsewhere. Your business builds awareness, credibility, and, over time, new customers.

This is what good content marketing is all about!

There are essentially two branches of research. On one side is quantitative research. This is research based on survey data, census data, or other large data sample sets. On the other side is qualitative research. With this, we’re talking about data collected via interviews, focus groups, or other observation-oriented activities.

Since the data in each method is so different, so is the type of content we can produce. Let’s look at how these two options compare.

Using Survey Data For Content Production

Using Interview Or Focus Group Research For Content Production

Let’s say you’re fully bought in to using research to power your content marketing. Now that you know there are two ways to do that, you have to choose which route to take. We like to use the following rules of thumb.

Opt for survey based content if you want to…

• Earn PR hits in magazines, newspapers, and other reputable publications
• Boost SEO quickly by building your inbound link profile from press hits
• Create charts, graphs, or other data visualizations

Opt for focus group / interview based content if you want to…

• Bring a human element to your content
• Boost SEO via a slow-and-steady link build up
• Isolate unique, nuanced ideas new to the market

Work with your team in advance to determine the business goals you have for your content. Once you isolate your goals, back into the approach that best lets you meet them.