How can you use qualitative research to assess brand equity?
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— The LinkedIn Team
Qualitative research is a powerful tool to understand how your customers perceive and relate to your brand. It can help you measure and improve your brand equity, which is the value that your brand adds to your products or services. In this article, you will learn how to use qualitative research methods to assess your brand equity and identify areas of strength and weakness.
Qualitative research is a type of research that explores the meanings, feelings, attitudes, and opinions of your target audience. It uses methods such as interviews, focus groups, surveys, observation, and content analysis to collect and analyze data. Qualitative research is useful for exploring complex and nuanced topics, such as brand perception, loyalty, and identity.
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Beth VanStory
CMO | CEO Right Hand | Executive Coach | Digital-First, Metrics-Driven Marketing Executive
Qualitative research is invaluable in gaining deeper emotional feedback. I have often gleaned great insights that helped to develop new messaging. The thing to keep in mind is that it is not projectable. And sometimes people are not truthful. It's not always intentional but for example, if you ask parents if it's important to them for their kids to eat healthy food, they will likely say "yes." However, many will still buy "junk food." That's where Sean's point about observing comes in. But it's not always feasible to observe consumers. Qualitative research can also help you understand where your brand is positioned vs. competitors in the consumer's mind. A good researcher will tease out valuable insights.
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Kadine Mc Lean
Digital Marketer| Social Media Manager | SEO Enthusiast | Digital Analyst| Client Experience Aficionado
Qualitative research is like having a heartfelt conversation with our customers. We can learn what makes our brand tick in their hearts and minds. We dive deep into their perceptions, emotions, and loyalty. It's not just about numbers; it's about the stories and associations that make our brand special. Through candid discussions, we uncover what clicks and what needs tweaking. This isn't just about data; it's about the trust, value, and emotional bonds we build. So, we chat, we listen, and we learn, all in the quest to make our brand even better, because, in the end, it's the real stories that shape our brand equity.
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Brand equity is the sum of the associations, emotions, and benefits that your customers have with your brand. It influences their purchase decisions, loyalty, and word-of-mouth. Quantitative research can help you measure your brand equity in terms of awareness, recognition, and preference. However, qualitative research can help you understand why your customers choose your brand, how they feel about it, and what they expect from it. Qualitative research can also help you uncover hidden insights, gaps, and opportunities that quantitative research may miss.
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José Pedro Marques da Silva
Marketing Director | Forbes 30 Under 30 | Marketing & Brand Management | Marketing Professor
Brand equity is the perceived value that a brand, positively and negatively adds to its products. Hence, qualitative research is essential to understand how the consumer truly feels about your brand. Some techniques are better than others with focus groups being extremely helpful - when well conducted - to unlock the deepest insights due to peer interaction with other consumers/customers. It is also interessant to understand that there are some key metrics (quantiative, I know!) that can give you some hints on how your brand equity is performing: the engagement level on your social media accounts can be interesting to understand how deeply connected and interested in you they are.
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Naomi Tucker
Leadership & Marketing Enthusiast | Agile, Scrum Master, Campaign Creator | Your Brand's Storyteller
🧐 Qualitative research is 🔑 for brand equity! While quantitative research measures awareness, recognition, and preference, it's qualitative research that delves into the "why" behind customer choices. 🤔❤️🤷♂️ Understanding the emotions, perceptions, and expectations tied to your brand is vital. 🚀🔍 Qualitative research reveals the heart of the matter and uncovers hidden gems and growth potential. 💎📈 So, to truly grasp the essence of your brand in your customers' eyes, don't underestimate the power of qualitative research! 🌟📊 #BrandEquity #CustomerInsights #QualitativeResearch 🤝📚
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When designing qualitative research for brand equity, the first step is to define research objectives and questions. Consider what you want to learn, how you will use the findings, who your target customers and competitors are, and what key dimensions of brand equity exist. This will inform your choice of methods, sample, and data collection. Next, select the appropriate qualitative methods for your research objectives and questions. Common methods include interviews, focus groups, surveys, observation, and content analysis. Finally, collect and analyze the data from your selected methods. Depending on the type and amount of data, you may use coding, categorizing, clustering or mapping to identify patterns and themes. Additionally, software tools such as NVivo, Atlas.ti or Qualtrics can be used to assist in the data analysis process.
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Sean Gilfillan
Fractional CRO Team for Tech Startups | Ex. Boeing Strategy, VC, M&A CMO; Viasat CMO | Grew $10M-$1B Revenue Tech Businesses
Don’t use this!!! Only focus on consumer behavior. OBSERVE them, never, ever ask. The reality is that we don’t know and only guess why we do things.
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Azeem Raja Syed
Marketing Communications Specialist | Copywriter | UI/UX Writer | Script Writer | Digital Marketer | Digital Branding and Advertising Specialist | Photographer | Documentary Filmmaker
Utilizing interviews, focus groups, surveys, observation, and content analysis aids in designing or re-designing a brand. Most of the time, applying these methods to a new target group helps to gain insights into their perspective of the brand.
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The final step is to use your qualitative research findings to inform and improve your brand equity. You can evaluate your performance and positioning in the market, identify strengths and weaknesses, discover unique value propositions, understand customer needs, refine your brand identity, develop or test new products, services, or features, and monitor and measure your impact. Qualitative research can provide rich and deep insights into customer perceptions and experiences. By exploring the why and how of your brand equity, you can create a strong and lasting connection with customers.
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Maria Fernandez de Osso
Qualitative Marketing Researcher @ GoGreenRoutes | Design Lead @ Ok Mentor | Digital Placemaking | Design for wellbeing
Leveraging insights from open-ended, in-depth research methods to better understand and increase your brand's worth and perception is the process of using qualitative research findings for brand equity. You can use this qualitative approach to: - Find key themes and insights - Refine your brand strategy - Enhance the customer experience - Monitor progress - Segment your audience - Develop a product or a service
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Rohit Raghuvansh
Ui Designer @Duplex Technologies | Pursuing PGC in Vdux @IITHyderabad| Data Analytics enthusiast @Datacamp
Qualitative research insights helps in maneuvering around the obstacles and positioning the brand better. Interacting with consumers helps understand them and the underlying problem better. Thus, creating a better and strong connection with the brand.
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Michael Hicks
Leader in Advanced Analytics for Commercial Effectiveness
If we can agree that ‘brand equity’ can be defined as an intangible asset that represents the power of a brand to influence customer behavior and purchase decisions, then by its very nature it will remain unmeasurable, at least by a singular method or even by a single metric. Qualitative research in and of itself is not sufficient or even necessary to assess it, but it can lead to hypotheses that can then be measured by other techniques (e.g., brand recall, ‘repeat’ or ‘persistent’ customers, to name a few. When purchases are highly clustered in a customer population - AND you can get a large enough sample in the research pool - it could yield additional benefits when projecting derived behaviors onto the larger population.
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Hamed Aghasadeghi
Marketing Communications Manager
Usually, we cannot guess at all what is the brand equity. Therefore, no matter how much we increase the advertising promotions, it will not be effective and we will not get the desired. That is why we need qualitative research. By presenting the brand in different conditions and to different target audiences and observing their reactions and finally collecting similar reactions, we can find the brand equity.
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