Hi, I'm Emily, Research Analyst at Drive Research! Haven't met me yet? Here's a few fun facts - I am a dog lover but don't have a dog, a water bottle carrier, an avid color coder, and I love the opportunity to talk about what I do.
In the spirit of my love to communicate, I recently participated in a webinar sponsored by SurveyGizmo titled, "Tricks of The Trade: Learn How to Supercharge Your Brand with Research". Here's more about the webinar if you're a detail hunter like me. The webinar featured myself along with other experts, one was from the U.S. Census Bureau and another was from A!A, an advertising agency. Also, here's the recording of the webinar.
Together we discussed why brand research is so important and how it actually gets done.
Eager for more? Thought so!
Below are 4 of the key points I discussed during the webinar.
Ready. Set. Webinar time.
Topic #1: Voice of Customer Research
The first topic I discussed in the brand research webinar is something we’ve had our focus on at Drive Research, Voice of Customer (VoC) research, which hits on a lot of the pain points that brand research addresses like losing customers, decreasing loyalty, and risk of becoming irrelevant. Each of these pain points present a pivotal moment for a brand, "How do we address this issue?"
Introducing: VoC!
VoC is a type of research that focuses on listening to customers and giving brands an opportunity to receive feedback in order to drive their strategy. This is powerful and those who have conducted VoC research know this. VoC research changes the dialogue within brands from, “This is where the industry is heading and I think we should do this” to, “We conducted research, listened to our customers, and I have data telling me customer feedback. This is what we should do.”
There are several different ways to conduct VoC research ranging from in-depth interviews to focus groups to online surveys. While it does depend on the type of organization, typically VoC research utilizes an online survey and sends that to all customers. This makes the research all inclusive rather than picking and choosing a select few customers for interviews or focus groups. It's important to get a complete view from data, rather than narrowing your focus.
We also find clients prefer to use online surveys for VoC research because it’s cost effective, the results are immediately actionable, fieldwork can be conducted much more quickly, and tracking and following up is simpler.
Oftentimes, VoC studies are redone every 12 or 18 months. This provides organizations benchmarks to see progress on new initiatives and identifies any new or reoccurring problems or success areas.
Looking for insight on types of questions that are used in VoC research? Spoiler alert - there are best questions to use.
Topic #2: Monthly Customer Surveys
Monthly customer and member surveys are another notable type of brand research that relates to this issue brands face like losing customers, decreasing loyalty, and risk of becoming irrelevant. Oftentimes, this type of research is used for credit unions, banks, and finance organizations.
To give you a brief example, monthly member surveys can use used by a credit union to send a short satisfaction survey to all new account holders within that month. From here, data is gathered each month and reported on to provide longitudinal data points to see progression, and areas of opportunity and success.
Wondering why you should look into monthly customer surveys? Monthly customer/member surveys gives businesses a competitive edge because they are able to address feedback consistently on the fly. Safe to say, businesses that use monthly customer/member surveys are agile.
Monthly customer surveys gives businesses an edge
Topic #3: Image and Awareness Studies
I also discussed image and awareness studies, which is a type of brand research used for several different types of organizations (many hospitals likely use this). Unlike VoC and monthly customer surveys, image and awareness studies gather feedback from customers and non-customers. This gives brands much more realistic data in terms of consumer awareness and other topics tested.
Image and awareness studies are more rigid. Brands want to survey a representative number of people within specific market areas to test their awareness of the brand, perception, as well as other things. Similar to VoC research, this type of study is typically redone every 12 to 18 months to serve as a benchmark to understand progress.
Looking for more on image and awareness studies? We've got you covered.
Topic #4: The Golden Rule of Market Research
The golden rule of exploratory research is to conduct qualitative research before quantitative research. Now I’m sure you’re wondering why?
The reason why it’s really important to conduct qualitative research before quantitative research is because qualitative exploratory research is designed to provide in-depth insight. It changes the rigid one-way communication of quantitative research into two-way open dialog that allows researchers to probe respondents for specific answers and key drivers.
Qualitative research is effective at exploring why while quantitative research is really powerful to define and measure specific factors. Doing qualitative research sets researchers up for success by exploring, and giving researchers the tools and insight to focus measurable, quantitative research so that it’s most effective.
Exhibit A: Explore first, then get specific and measurable
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