If you are serious about managing the brands of your own company or clients’ businesses, then you probably heard about the importance of brand analysis.
But what is a brand analysis, and how can a brand analysis bring value to your company? This article will explain just that.
Here at Brand Auditor, we do brand audits for companies in all shapes and sizes. Startups, small local businesses, established decade-old companies, consultants, hotels, e-commerce stores, and other businesses buy brand audits from us.
What is a brand analysis?
You might find various other interpretations of the topic, but we encourage you to stick to the industry standard definition:
The definition of brand analysis, according to Indeed.com:
Brand analysis is a marketing process that evaluates your company’s branding strategies and methods. Branding involves your company’s identity and personality. It’s the message you send to your customers and potential clients. Brand analysis is a set of steps and strategies that you can use to assess your company’s current branding strategies. You can use this analysis to find your marketing strengths and identify areas of improvement.
Indeed.com
Read more: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/brand-analysis
In a marketing and brand management context, when brand analysis typically refers to the following types of research:
- Brand sentiment analysis
- Brand perception analysis
- Brand awareness analysis
1, Brand sentiment analysis
Brand sentiment analysis is a surface-level brand monitoring method. It allows the continuous measurement of reactions to brand content, as well as to monitor social media comments, blog posts, news, and other content sources.
In most cases, brand sentiment analysis is done by using social listening tools. Notable social listening companies are Bran24 or Brandwatch.
Social listening and brand sentiment analysis are particularly useful for large brands and well-recognized companies that people talk about. In a nutshell, social listening tools work by aggregating any brand mentions, hashtags, and organizing those into various insights.
Small businesses with minimal social media buzz and little brand recognition are not likely to benefit from brand sentiment analysis, as the system will be unable to collect sufficient data to prepare meaningful brand optimization strategies.
Even in the case of large brands, insights social listening, and sentiment analysis are limited to tactic-level optimization instead of strategic changes.
Brand sentiment analysis is the most cost-efficient of all brand analysis tools, making it a great entry-level brand management tool for businesses on a budget.
2, Brand perceptions and reputation analysis
Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand. Positive experiences and perception equal positive brand equity, and the same goes for negative notions.
Also known as customer perception analysis, brand perceptions are measured to find out how different segments of target customers perceive a brand.
Instead of collecting social signals and analyzing the sentiment of comments and reviews, brand perception analysis is done by market research.
The analysis process starts with segmentation, grouping customers with similar characteristics. Segmentation is important to understand how potential customers from various demographics, socio-cultural backgrounds, and needs think about the brand.
Typical basis of segmentation are:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Values
- Income
- Interests
- Habits
Once the segments are established, the company will use market research tools to collect feedback and opinion from each segment separately. In the case of a brand perception analysis, questions are carefully selected to reveal what target customers think about the brand, what they like and dislike and why.
Brand perception analysis provides more in-depth insights that are often used to prepare strategic changes in brand management and marketing communications.
Small businesses with minimal marketing budgets often cannot afford to invest in brand perception analysis, as market research costs are high. Depending on the segment sizes, useful and reliable results might require millions of feedback data, which can easily cost millions of dollars. In the case of small and medium-sized businesses focusing on a niche market, collecting 2000 to 5000 valid responses might be enough – but that size of market research can also cost thousands of dollars.
3, Brand awareness measurement and analysis
Market-wide familiarity with your brand associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms.
Measuring brand awareness is a form of brand analysis. The purpose of brand awareness measurement is to understand brand strength in various segments of the target audience.
Be it geographical, regional, demographical, or socio-cultural segments, knowing how many people know your brand is crucial to understand how to prioritize or re-evaluate brand-building efforts. The previously listed segmentation criteria can be used here as well.
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Values
- Income
- Interests
- Habits
Similar to brand perception analysis, auditing brand awareness is done by market research. Since this research does not require survey participants to answer multiple questions, survey response rates are typically higher. This results in lower cost per response, however, brand awareness measurement requires a significantly higher market research size to get reliable results.
This practice is hardly ever affordable for businesses without a generous brand management budget.
How to analyze your brand with Brand Auditor?
Brand Auditor lets you measure what your target customers like or dislike about your business, products, services, branding and marketing communications. Our audits bring Fortune 500 industry-standard brand audit frameworks to an affordable price point.
If you are interested in measuring various aspects of your brand, then we recommend taking a look on the following audits:
All audits are starting from $500 – allowing flexible configuration options to create audits that fit both your budget and requirements.