Brand Equity Market Research: Design a study that achieves valuable results

This is the second eTip! on brand equity market research. The March issue provided an overview of brand equity and how research can be used to improve performance. This edition highlights common objectives of brand equity market research and methodology considerations. The next issue will explore components of an integrated brand equity market research program.

As defined in last month’s eTip!, the equity of a brand is the added revenue it captures over competitive alternatives with the same attributes. In the healthcare marketplace, patients, physicians, and managed care organizations are the primary decision-making groups, and each has a specific set of wants and needs. A brand’s performance relies heavily on the complex interaction of these groups and its ability to address current priorities.

A brand equity market research study can help you understand what motivates decision-makers to choose your brand over another. This information can be used to assess performance, manage resources, and identify opportunities for brand extensions. Specific objectives for brand equity research often include:

• Identify and rate the importance of product features that are considered important by patients, physicians, and MCOs to achieve optimal positioning
• Measure how your brand and key competitors are performing on priority characteristics within target segments to assess value structures
• Identify opportunities to build and leverage your brand’s equity to withstand competitive promotions and future launches

Based on the specifics of your product, current market conditions, and your business objectives, you and your research partner can custom design a brand equity research study using the following three-step process.

1. Assess current knowledge base.

Before engaging in any primary research, make sure you understand what you already know. 1 Review past market research studies, evaluate secondary data sources, and brainstorm with your project stakeholders. 2 Hypothesize which of the primary decision-making groups described above are driving the brand’s equity, and discuss potential options and opportunities for testing your hypotheses. This process will help align team members, pool expertise, and clarify objectives.

As part of this exercise, develop a small list of physical characteristics and emotional associations that are likely driving brand choice, and note what tools are available to measure the financial impact of a decision-making group’s preference for your brand. When existing information sources have been exhausted and unanswered questions remain, embark on a primary market research program that includes both qualitative and quantitative components.

2. Conduct qualitative exploratory research.

Focus groups, interviews with key audiences, and other qualitative techniques will identify your brand’s primary competitors and uncover potential drivers of product choice. This phase will generate insight to what product attributes and external influences are important to decision makers. This information will be used to develop a quantitative instrument that is more targeted—and therefore more effective—than one that could be developed without exploratory data. As a bonus, information related to opportunities for improvement and growth of the brand usually arises during qualitative research, and this additional insight can also be tested in the quantitative phase.

In most cases, a few final qualitative interviews will be dedicated to pre-testing the draft quantitative instrument. This step assures that respondents understand the survey questions and that the tool is constructed to generate the