Brand Equity Market Research: Leverage your brand’s equity to capture and retain market share

This is the first issue of three-part eTip! series on brand equity market research. It provides an overview of brand equity and how research can be used to improve performance. The April edition will highlight common objectives of brand equity market research and methodology considerations. The May eTip! will explore components of an integrated brand equity market research program.

In the healthcare industry, if your product meets clinical and safety standards and is available to the market, most people assume it’s going to work as advertised. So what motivates a physician or patient to choose your brand over another? Discovering and monitoring the answers to this question is the essence of brand equity market research.

Building a strong and positive brand for your product is one way to distinguish it from competitors. Strong brands are easier to market; they retain market share when competitors enter the market; they facilitate quick decisions for busy physicians; and they enhance your company’s performance and financial appeal.

What is brand equity?

Brand equity is often defined as the added revenue that a branded product captures over a non-branded product with the same attributes. This value hinges on the brand’s identity in the market—its real and perceived benefits, its personality, and the feelings and related imagery it provides. Overall, a brand’s identity is composed of two characteristics:

• Functional attributes include the product’s therapeutic quality, method of administration, side effects, and other tangible features.
• Emotional associations are the perceptions and feelings that patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers have for the brand versus alternatives. For example, a physician may view a specific brand as a reliable and safe product that gives patients their lives back.

Yet it’s important to remember that a brand’s identity—or reputation—is not only developed as a result of your team’s efforts to establish it in the marketplace. It is also built through the collective experience of patients, physicians, and managed care organizations—the healthcare market’s primary segments. Each of these groups has a specific set of needs and makes choices based on how well a product meets these needs. In general:

• Patients want medications that are easy to take and improve their health without bothersome side effects.
• Physicians look for safe therapies that satisfy their patients—in terms of efficacy, tolerability, and ease of compliance.
• Managed Care Organizations value drugs that improve patient health at the lowest cost.

To win and retain these customer segments in the ever-changing healthcare industry, companies must watch closely—and listen carefully—to keep a pulse on perceptions and preferences in the market. Monitoring your brand’s equity will help you adjust promotional campaigns and other branding tactics to addresses shifting behavioral drivers.

Who matters most to your brand’s performance?

The basis of long-term differentiation associated with brand equity is often a measure of a product’s emotional benefits. Yet some pharmaceutical products command less emotional ties from certain segments than others. By assessing where your product fits, you can determine which market segments have the greatest impact on its equity. Most brands fit into one of the following three categories:

• Vital : Brand awareness and loyalty among end-users and physicians are highest for drugs that are necessary for a patient<