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Is your brand Superman or Lex Luthor?

May 17, 2023

Superman v. Lex Luthor

Karen Chandler

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Thursday 22nd June 2023

11.15 – 12.00 BST / 12.15 – 13.00 CEST / 15.45 – 16.30 IST

Superman or Lex Luthor? Good or evil? Does it matter if your brand exhibits the same personality traits as supervillains? In this webinar, Senior Analyst John Palm will take you through why being perceived the same as a so-called baddie can actually be beneficial in a highly competitive market, by helping you build a strong brand.

The webinar is based off research from our soon to be launched ‘Hero or Villain’ whitepaper. In it we take 14 famous superheroes and villains, 10 clothes brands, along with 10 car brands, and measure them using our proprietary solution Brand Touch. You’ll find out if Gucci​ is more Batman or the Joker, and if Tesla is more Wolverine or Magneto.

Sign up here.

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Tre’s brand revamp: Strategy for profitable growth

May 02, 2023

Stockholm, Sweden - March 3, 2021: Close-up view of the telecom operator 3 ( Hi3G Access AB) logotype at the head office in Stockholm.

Karen Chandler

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This post was guest authored by Jim Carlberg, who most recently held the role as Head of Marketing for telecom operator Tre/3.

“In early 2019, Tre had high brand awareness, but only 14% of the Swedish population would consider choosing us. Traditionally, we attracted customers with discounts, which impacted long-term margins and retention rates. Tre needed to make people really want to choose our brand again to get back to profitable growth.

So, we asked Nepa for help. We conducted extensive strategic work that resulted in a new strong foundation to build on; A completely different segmentation model for the market, new core target groups, updated definitions of drivers that create consideration, a revamped strategic position based on growth potential, and finally, a new communication concept.

The telecom industry in Sweden has often been associated with complex contracts, making it hard for people to compare operators. The analysis showed that a “simple, flexible, and helpful operator” would have a higher consideration – and this was attributes that most operators lacked. For us it suddenly became clear, we know Tre delivers on all these attributes, but our consumers didn’t.

Based on this insight we asked the question – How do we create a concept that both increases liking, consideration, and differentiates us from competitors?

We found the answer in Tre’s internal culture, which had been named among the top best workplaces in Sweden for several years in a row. With this as a starting point we could prove to the Swedish people who Tre really are, without making up an untrue story; the TREvliga operator (a wordplay with our brand name and the Swedish word for “friendly and nice”). Our new communication concept became effective because we chose to present what people look for in an operator whilst remaining true and unique to Tre. We removed all asterisks, avoided complicated terms, and pretentious words – we simply made it much more “Trevligt” for everyone.

Based on the clear direction and fresh insights from the work conducted with Nepa, we focused extensively on innovation and development over the next three years, launching products and services better suited to market needs, and marketed the brand and our offerings in a new and more interesting way.

“Trevligt” is now fully integrated in the business. It affects everything, from how we attract and onboard new employees, how we prioritize our roadmap for products and services, how we meet customers in all channels, and of course – our communicative expression and how we market Tre.

When “Trevligt” was launched, we managed to fill several needs with one approach. We started from something that was true for Tre, and that the entire company and culture could stand behind and live every day. We created something unique to the business that no other competitor could own. And we dramatized it in a way that broke through in an industry that is among the largest media buyers in Sweden, where everyone is essentially shouting about the same thing.

In other words, we questioned old truths, ignored what everyone else did, and aimed high on the value of building a strong brand from the inside out.

The results have been nothing but amazing. Brand consideration has increased from 14% to 18%, and Ad Liking doubled from an average 22% to 44% over the last campaign. The business is now flourishing – last year our customer base increased by 7.5%, with improved margins and profitability. Customer churn has decreased, and NPS increased by 12%. As a result of our new strategy, based on initial work with Nepa, last year we had the best financial year in Tre’s history since we started back in 2003.”

Jim’s top tips on how to best work with insights

Utilize market research to identify consumer needs: No more guesswork – to understand market trends and what’s really driving your customers behaviours is vital. Tre’s strategic work shaped our marketing and communication strategy, increasing all of our brand and business KPI’s.

Align marketing with brand values and culture: Tre used its top-rated company culture to create a communication strategy reflecting our values, differentiating us from competitors and resonating more with consumers.

Innovate based on insights and feedback: Tre’s focus on innovation and development, guided by market research and customer feedback, led us to increased satisfaction, reduced churn, and improved profitability.

About the author

Jim Carlberg is an experienced marketing executive, who most recently held the role as Head of Marketing for telecom operator Tre/3.

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Have your cake and eat it: How brand building campaigns can drive both short and long-term sales

April 20, 2023

Business portrait - businessman using laptop computer in office, thinking. Happy middle aged man, entrepreneur working online.

Karen Chandler

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These days, many companies earmark separate budgets for long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. However, here at Nepa we have been seeing an increasing number of examples, both in our own data and other meta studies, that successful brand building creatives can drive short-term sales too.

Consumers care less about what effects a campaign is designed to have, and more that it appeals to their current needs, views and personality  Too much focus on finding the right split between long and short-term benefits could therefore result in less effective campaigns and ultimately lower ROIs. 

More than a decade ago, evidence that most companies are underinvesting in brand building was successfully presented by Binet and Fields in their world-famous IPA paper “The Long and Short of It”, and marketers took note.  The publication suggested companies need to balance their marketing between long-term brand building communication and shorter-term activation marketing, with a suggested average split of 60/40 in favour of longer-term objectives. 

What does the latest research say?

In a recent piece of cross-media research Nepa conducted in conjunction with Meta, the results demonstrated that many channels yielded effects both in the short and long-term.

As seen above, most media types can contribute to both short and long-term effects, especially online video, social media, and display. The effect of long vs short is not only connected to media type but also the creative content in each media. So, this begs the question, can the same communication build both? 

We see similar indications when looking at our data on campaign creatives. It shows ads that perform strongly on brand building KPIs are not only driving long-term effects, but also short-term ones.

A typical objective for brand building communications is to evoke a positive emotional reaction among the audience that can be connected back to the brand. Hence, “ad-liking” is usually seen as an important KPI for measuring brand building effects in ads. On the other hand, “persuasive message” with a “clear call to action” are usually seen as important KPIs for sales activation. 

When we analysed our campaign performance database we can clearly see those campaigns with high emotional liking – the typical objective for brand building campaigns – are not only driving a positive brand perception, but they also trigger call to action effects, like purchases or website visits.  

Based on more than 3,000 campaigns in Nepa’s database classified in levels 0-6 by average liking score from lowest to highest. The green curve shows the change in short-term ad impact compared to the previous level of ad liking.

Campaigns with high “ad-liking” have a significantly higher short-term impact than campaigns with a lower “ad-liking” score. The more an audience likes the creatives, the more inclined they are to act directly.  

In summary, here at Nepa we have found evidence across different sources of data that successful brand building creatives can also help a company to drive short-term sales. Whilst focusing on both long-term brand building and short-term sales is important, we believe that businesses who focuses on creating the most effective messaging for their consumers will reach the perfect balance between long and short.  

Written by Thomas Berthelsen and Robert Beatus, Nepa’s Heads of R&D

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The Nepa Marketing & Insights Dinner 2023

April 04, 2023

A scenic view of the famous Somerset House in London under a wispy sky

Karen Chandler

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We recently held our annual Marketing & Insights dinner at the stunning Somerset House in London. It was an exclusive, invite-only event for marketing and insights leaders to network and exchange ideas. Brands such as Unilever, Heineken, and L’Oréal joined us for a gourmet three course dinner and reception, with presentations from Mars, GANT, Klarna, and some of the Nepa team on the theme ‘What are your key brand and marketing challenges in 2023?”

Throughout the night several common challenges came up from CMOs and CMIs across a range of different industries and regions. These included:

– Marketing budget being frozen or reduced, but with an expectation that marketing will still fuel growth.

– Reorganisations creating a lack of consistency for marketing and insights teams.

– Getting channel strategies right, thanks to the massive increase in digital activities and channel fragmentation.

However, the theme that was most discussed was marketing efficiencies and how to get the best bang for your buck. It’s something that we’ve been hearing a lot from our customers recently. How Nepa can help with this? And it all comes down to data. In order to make sure you’re making the most effective decisions, you need to understand the consequences. Our core Marketing Intelligence solutions are designed to do just this (and when combined can supercharge your insights!).

– Brand Tracking shows your brand and how it sits in the market. By measuring continuously you can see the immediate effects of your activities, and easily see what is working and what isn’t. It also collects data on your competitors, so you can view the impacts of their brand and marketing spend.

– Marketing mix modelling lets you see the effects of your marketing investments, without spending a penny. You can adjust your potential media investments, and see which blend allows you to hit your company specific KPIs.

– Campaign evaluations allow you to see how different messages work for different segments across different media, giving you the ability to optimise your creative content before you put any money into its creation and distribution.

It truly was a fabulous event. “Just wanted to say congratulations again for last night’s triumph”, “I really enjoyed the presentation and I met some interesting marketers”, and “The presentations were very insightful, the location unique and everything was very well organized” were just some of the feedback we received from attendees. If you’d like to join our next Marketing & Insights dinner, why not sign up to our newsletter? You can find it here: https://nepa.com/event-newsletter/

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Sinebrychoff trusts Nepa to illuminate their Shopper Journeys

The story

Founded in 1819 in Helsinki, Sinebrychoff is Finland’s largest brewery. Alongside producing their award-winning beers, ciders, long drinks and energy drinks, the company owns the licence for manufacturing several global soft-drinks, such as Coca-Cola, Powerade, and Schweppes. Sinebrychoff is part of the international Carlsberg group.

Sinebrychoff’s focus goal for year 2023 was to understand the complete shopper journey and Nepa was chosen to conduct the work. A deep-dive into the 5W’s – who, what, where, why, and when – by shopper insights experts Nepa has given Sinebrychoff the data they need to fine tune their collaboration with creative agencies and provide a valuable input to fuel their future brand developments.

“Nepa’s solution was chosen due to its holistic approach, giving us ability to utilize the project in brand & marketing planning towards retail customers as well as agency partners.”

— Riikka Tommila, Insight Manager, Sinebrychoff

Cheers! Clink glasses. Close-up shots of hands holding beer glasses and beer bubbles.

The plan

It was important to Sinebrychoff to understand all of the drivers throughout the sales process. These questions started at the beginning – why consumers chose which specific brands to purchase and stores to purchase from – and followed the Shopper Journey all the way down to which in-store touch points were the most important to drive sales, and whether these purchases were considered or impulsive.

It was also important that the results could be used by all departments across the business. Nepa held several workshops with the company’s Insights, Brand & Marketing, and Accounts teams to ensure that all key business needs were going to be met by the study.

The result

A quantitative study was launched by Nepa to unravel Sinebrychoff’s Shopper Journeys in seven key categories. It covered the whole purchase cycle, from decision making and consideration, to point-of-purchase and post-purchase questions. However, the insights did not stop there.

In parallel with the on-going project work, Nepa and Sinebrychoff worked together to further enrich the findings and make the most of the data collected. As a result of this iterative approach, a series of more in-depth analyses were created focusing on specific segments, competitors, and retailers.

This Shopper Journey collaboration has not only given them the insights needed to improve their messaging all the way along the consumer journey, but it has also added great value to their retail chain partnerships. The data will be used widely in trade marketing and customer work.

“Shopper Journeys is our core theme for 2023 as the insights gathered can be used at all levels, from strategic planning to tactical activities”, says Riikka Tommila, Insight Manager, Sinebrychoff.

The result

7

key categories

5W’s

Who, what, where, why, & when

Our Approach

We convert data into
opportunities for growth

Marketing is an investment

Many brands are seeing budget cuts. But focusing only on short-term goals means you can miss the contribution of long-term brand building to growth. To demonstrate the ROI of your marketing you need a team that is experienced in linking your brand KPIs to your company’s financial performance, over time. We help you make those connections, which are essential for making marketing decisions that drive growth.

Ensure brand relevance

As technologies, trends, and industries shift, so do your customers. You need to keep on the pulse of people’s perceptions and behaviours by understanding how your brand is used, its personality, and how your communications are working in order to make adjustments over time.

Select the right channels

Assessing the strength of each individual media channel helps you to focus on the right investments. But most media measurement does not integrate and evaluate all the different channels now available. Our Media Mix Modelling assesses the ROI of all media investments including social, allowing brands to make decisions around budgets for every media, execution, campaign duration, and creative.

Increase market share

There are several ways to increase market share. Sell more to existing customers. Expand your customer base. Sell through new channels. However, in order to choose the right option, you need to understand your potential customer base.

Our Market Segmentation gives you clear, useful information on both current and potential customers. It splits people into different groups based on needs and values, offering insights on how to grow your brand in these different markets.

Measure your performance

As media changes, so do people and their behaviour. To improve performance, you need to evaluate and evolve your campaigns constantly, so that you can make and measure adjustments over time. We help you find the right mix of channels, messaging, creative, and format to increase your impact and ROI.

OUR WIDER OFFER

Adapt to win

Our 360-degree, continuous approach shows how consumers think, helps realise growth potential, and demonstrates return on investment.

Marketing Mix Modelling

Adjust activity in near real-time with models that are continuously learning from your media activity, sales performance, and brand health.

Explore

Campaign Evaluation

Running campaigns is all about constant evaluation and evolution. Find the right mix of channels, messaging, creative, and format to get the most out of your communications.

Explore

Custom Modules

Use additional modules to manage pricing, brand personality, brand assets and category drivers and place customers at the heart of your marketing decisions.

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CONTACT

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Nepa’s Brand Tracking Dashboard

March 31, 2023

Young latin professional business woman office worker analyst sitting at desk working on laptop thinking on project plan, analyzing marketing or financial data online, watching elearning webinar.

Karen Chandler

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The key to building a strong brand is to think long-term. Short-term sales activation can be highly profitable and efficient, but if you’re looking to build an enduring brand you also need to focus on the future.


To plot your best route for long-term success, you need to understand exactly how your brand is currently sitting in the marketplace. Nepa’s Brand Tracking dashboard looks beyond the obvious KPIs, and gives you ‘always on’ insights into your identity, reputation, and competition. These can help you confidently inform your future business plans, alongside giving you the data needed to justify your investments.

What makes our Brand Tracking dashboard so useful?

There are many reasons global brands choose Nepa’s Brand Tracking dashboard and find it such a key weapon in their marketing arsenal. As the Insight Manager for multinational telecoms operator Telenor told us “We love the Nepa dashboard, which is a valuable, hands-on tool to quickly help us with market insights.”

It gives you a holistic view

Different businesses have different priorities, which is why our Brand Tracker can be configured to give you a view of the metrics that matter most for your brand, from its strength and positioning, to your media performance and NPS. It also puts your brand in perspective by looking at the stats of your entire market, making sure you won’t miss any early warning signs.

It’s great for companies with different categories, channels, and markets, as all tracking and operational data can be combined in one place. You can therefore compare results, and see at a glance what is working and where you can improve.

Brand Tracking Dashboard Market's View

It’s ‘always on’

You don’t need to download separate software to access our dashboard, which means that your tracking data can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, by anyone who has been set up with a username and password. But you don’t need to worry about security – each dashboard has its own access control.

As it’s ‘always on’, all departments and locations can access the tracking data to see the effects of their region-specific campaigns, in close to real-time. This means that the data won’t get siloed, and can be used as a business tool to make informed decisions throughout the company.

It allows you to capitalise on fast-emerging trends

The dynamically updated dashboard gives you the data to make faster, better decisions. Being the first to react to fast-emerging trends always gives a brand the competitive edge. Understanding the real-time effectiveness of specific marketing activities and messaging gives your brand the knowledge of where to focus your energy going forward, to both act on hidden opportunities and protect against threats.

It’s continuous

A big drawback of many Brand Trackers is that measurements are periodic, via quota sampling. In most cases this methodology struggles to pick up real-world changes as it just takes a ‘snap-shot’ in time. Our tracking data is continuous, meaning that as your positioning and market share evolve, so do your insights, offering you the clarity to make the right choices.

You can trust your data

Brand Tracking is a great tool. But like all tools, not all are born equal. Depending on the methodologies used, Brand Tracking is not always precise enough. It can be a challenge to separate the signal from the noise of natural random error in a sample.

This is where our proprietary algorithm Brand Noise Reduction comes in. It analyses all of the respondent’s data, identifies correlations between their answer patterns, and how these fluctuate over a period of time. As a result, Brand Noise Reduction can distinguish between plain sample variations, and those that reflect real market changes. It has been proven to reduce random errors by up to 50%, boosting data accuracy and opening up possibilities for a more granular brand analysis.

Read more about Brand Noise Reduction here.

It’s easy to use

Many in the industry rely on standard PowerPoints or PDFs for their deliveries. Our Brand Tracking dashboard, however, is a much more interactive affair. You can view your data in a multitude of ways – broken down into different time periods, categories, and metrics. It also allows you to share insights across your organisation directly from the platform via a simple export, making data sharing simple.  

However, there are chances that you’ll have some questions when using your Brand Tracking dashboard. Whilst user guides and FAQs are great, sometimes you just want to ask a real person. This is why your Brand Tracking dashboard comes with a host of human experts to help you really make the most of your investment.

And what’s still to come?

Over the coming year we will be combining our Brand Tracking dashboard with our other Marketing Intelligence suite products; MMM and Campaign Evaluations. Our dashboard will become your one-stop shop for all of your marketing insights!

Get in touch.

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Nepa and data quality

February 07, 2023

Stortorget place in Gamla stan, Stockholm

Karen Chandler

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There has been a lot of talk in the industry recently regarding poor data quality. High reversal rates (project deliveries that are deemed fraudulent) have been seen by many market research companies across the globe, and have affected consumer confidence. So what’s causing these reversals? The simple answer is cheaters: people taking part in these projects who try to cheat the system, usually for monetary gain. This can be by an individual, or professional survey cheaters with bots.

Here at Nepa we have combined a whole host of technical solutions and business policies to help discover and reconcile these fraudulent entries. This ensures that our data and insights are one of the best in the business, and helps our data suppliers fight the ever increasing trend of survey fraud.

What types of cheaters are there?

We have recently completed a deep-dive into the quality of our global data suppliers, and evaluated 7 key markers that could suggest a response being considered invalid:

Duplicates
This is simple. These are people or bots who repeatedly enter the same data. Knowing IP information and other digital footprint characteristics can also help identify these respondents. When using multiple supply sources, the risk for duplicates is higher and should be accounted for.

Speedracers
These are someone who is going through the questions far quicker than the average participant. This implies that they are not reading the questions fully and responding to them honestly. Nowadays, many survey takers are cautious about their survey pace (being aware of this marker) which makes speed racing alone a poor marker of invalidation.

Inconsistent repliers
These are people who give conflicting information throughout the survey. An easy way of identifying these is to ask them their age at the beginning, and then ask them their year of birth at the end to see if they match. This can be a powerful marker of bots.

Straightliners
These are easy to identify, as the consumer has simply used the same answer option throughout the survey.

Randomisers
Survey responses usually fit trends, so those that don’t appear to do so suggest the respondent has simply clicked random answers throughout. If applicable in survey, this can be a powerful method of identifying non-engaged respondents.

Open-enders
Sometimes respondents give non-serious answers for open ended questions. These can be analysed automatically in surveys, although the most powerful control comes from manual inspection. When a survey contains brand type of open-ended questions, the manual coding and correction of brand spelling is imperative.

Third-partiers
Reputable outside companies can be used to assess the data, and give recommendations for those they believe are cheaters. They use AI and proprietary algorithms to take into account all of the points above, and more.

Once identified as fraudulent, we go back to our suppliers with the information, so they can be removed from the panels. This ensures that neither you nor Nepa are paying for dirty data.

With suggestions that 5-15% of market research data might be from cheaters failing more than one of above markers, how do you ensure that your research is giving you usable insights?

How to counteract fraud

Identify

There’s a large toolbox that can be used to identify cheaters in your market research. Some of those we use here at Nepa include:

Automated statistical analysis
Applying specific statistical techniques, preferably built into the survey flow, can aid in identifying cheaters. Working out the median length of interview and removing those that are far quicker is one to target speedsters. Maxdiff analysis can identify those responses that are more random than the average. Variance of grid question responses gives insights of straight-lining behaviour.

Manual feedback
Although they are more resource heavy than statistical analysis, setting up manual flags for questionable data is a great way of weeding out responses that analysis may miss.

3rd party software
Trusted third parties can be used to automatically identify dupes, fraudsters, bots, and survey farms. Their proprietary algorithms are great at recognising professional survey cheaters in particular.

CAPTCHA check
A CAPTCHA test is designed to determine if an online user is really a human and not a bot. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for bots and other malicious software to figure out.

Counteract

Understanding your suppliers, your markets, and your data is key to counteract fraud. Automated reconciliation processes will support data suppliers in their work on keeping their online panels of high quality and may help turn the trend of increased fraud. Our recent deep-dive into our suppliers has shown us that samples in our different regions, suppliers, and industries all differ due to location specific variations. By understanding these differences, it is easy for us here at Nepa to add adjustments that negate these issues and ensure that your insights are as clean as possible. 

“Nepa’s focus on data quality continues to be a core of our business, in order for us to be able to deliver reliable insights to our clients. We ensure sampling consistency in combination with valid and engaged respondents, by well-established end-to-end processes and a toolbox of methodologies.”

Fredrik Olsson, Head of Data Procurement

For more information, please contact hello@nepa.com.

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What is a Touchpoint Strength Tracker?

December 13, 2022

Karen Chandler

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In a world full of rapid changes, being able to make fast, data-driven decisions has never been more important.

Our Touchpoint Strength Tracker (TST) is the essential tool to provide the necessary information needed for your planning team to make smarter investment decisions on a continuous basis. Through ongoing tracking of touchpoint frequency and strength, the TST provides the information you need to understand your touchpoints.

How does the Touchpoint Strength Tracker work?

By using advanced data modelling, our Touchpoint Strength Tracker uncovers insights covering

1. How frequently individual shoppers are exposed to them

2. How frequently individual shoppers are exposed to them

3. The strength of each individual touchpoint at driving purchases

Touchpoint Strength Tracker example

Your touchpoints at a glance

Don’t wait to find out how your media campaigns or market changes are affecting your touchpoint effectivity. Our Touchpoint Strength Tracker provides a continuous view of the shopper landscape, ensuring that you can quickly adapt strategies in changing market conditions.

Drive incremental sales

By understanding how each touchpoint is performing on a continuous basis, you can validate the existing strategies for each and make changes where needed. With access to this information, it’s easy to see if you’re spending your budget in the right way to drive short-term sales growth.

Paths to Purchase

Our TST is the perfect accompaniment to our Paths to Purchase product. P2P provides brands with a strategic set of insights at all levels, such as channel, shopper audience, motivations, retailer, product type, demand occasion, first purchasers, planned vs unplanned, brand, category penetration and growth, eCommerce etc. It is measured in depth, across a purchase cycle, offering granular insights.

Want to find out more about how our Touchpoint Strength Tracker can help you spot early warning signs of how your brand strategies are working (or not)? Why not get in touch.

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Customer Journey Agency

November 07, 2022

Karen Chandler

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Understanding your customers’ journey thoroughly helps you identify problems that may occur when completing a purchase or converting.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is often shown as a visual representation of your users’ actions when exploring your site or physical shop. It usually shows this in the form of steps, showing each stage a customer goes through.

This can be done as an infographic or flow chart. This can highlight any complex issues or actions that might take a user away from completing a purchase.

Speak with a customer journey expert

What are the benefits of a customer journey agency?

Hiring a customer journey agency allows you to focus on your business while we track and present results in an easy to read manner. It will show you where you can optimise the process, and it helps to simplify the journey so consumers can easily navigate through the steps. This can lead to an increase in goal completions and conversion rates.

Find out more about Customer Experience here.

Our Customer Journey Services

Customer Experience

With a customer journey agency, you can enhance your customer journey, and therefore experience when navigating through your website.

You can either optimise your existing process or design a new one from scratch with CX technology centred around customer experience and growth.

Learn more.

Brand Health Tracking

As a leading customer journey agency in the UK, we will analyse your brand health to help you increase performance and identify the things your customers value most. Using our brand strategists, we’ll optimise your ad campaigns and discover hidden opportunities.

Learn more.

Innovation Acceleration

We make sure your users’ customer journey is a positive experience. Using enhanced qualitative marketing strategies to target customers with data-driven insights and solutions. We uncover advanced techniques to accelerate your innovation.

Meet your target customers requirements for segmentation, ideation, and concept test through innovation acceleration with an advanced customer journey agency.

Learn more.

Marketing Mix Modelling

Record all of the actions your company goes through to promote your services or products using a marketing mix model. We create an effective model to maximise your sales potential while creating partnerships with digital platforms.

Learn more.

Paths to Purchase

Effectively track your customers’ journey with a path to purchase. This can help you learn how your customers interact with touchpoints that can drive conversions. Uncover and monitor each action and explore the critical steps in your customer journey to increase sales.

Learn more.

Speak with our Customer Service Agency in the UK

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Brand Performance Explained: Importance & Strategies

November 03, 2022

Gateway Of India Mumbai

Karen Chandler

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At Nepa, we strive to improve the performance of your brand through a variety of market research strategies. It can be carried out to improve success in the long term.

What is brand performance marketing?

Brand performance marketing, also known as brand purpose marketing, focuses on improving your brand’s reputation and of course, its performance. It involves portraying your brand values in a way that increases your customer’s understanding of the service or product, therefore increasing the trustworthiness of your brand.

It can also increase consumers’ want or desire to become loyal to your brand through brand positioning techniques and visual narratives to create a relationship between consumers and your brand.

What are some brand performance indicators?

When measuring the significance of brand performance, it can be difficult to accurately review the impact it has had on sales, awareness, and reputation.

There are certain tools you can use that can help you measure brand performance, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console. However, first you need to determine your KPIs.

Metrics and KPIs in brand performance marketing

To begin looking at your KPIs, consider the following points to establish where you currently stand in terms of awareness.

Top-of-mind brand awareness

Top-of-mind brand awareness (TOMA) refers to how the consumers currently perceive your brand name in a specific category of product. For example, when you think of a hoover, you think Dyson, when you think of glasses, you think Specsavers.

Understanding the TOMA is a key concept in market and brand performance research, it can help you order how high different brands rank in consumers’ consciousness.

Unaided brand awareness

Unaided brand awareness is defined as the ability for your target audience to identify or list your brand name alongside other brands without hints or clues. For example, if you were asking people for a list of bed manufacturers, would they list your brand name among SilentNight, Simba, Emma, and Sleepeezee?

If consumers aren’t able to identify your brand alongside the top brands in your category, this can provide you with opportunities to try and increase your brand’s reputation and familiarity with that industry.

Aided brand awareness

Unlike unaided brand awareness, this method of brand performance tracking involves asking your target audience if they have ever heard of your brand name before. For example, you may ask your audience if they have heard of SilentNight, Simba, Emma, and Sleepeezee before, if they are familiar with the top brand names, then ask if they have heard of your brand.

This method of brand performance again challenges the idea that your brand is recognised within that industry or category alongside larger brand names.

Product launch

Prior to the product launch, you can test out your brand performance. Testing individual components before the product or service becomes live can help identify issues before they arise.

This can include visual ads or social media posts, creative copy, and content to see if it presents the right message you want to convey to your audience, as well as the intended response. You can even split test features of the campaign to see which returns more clicks.

Other tools to measure brand performance

There are a range of tools that can be used to measure brand performance, these help you identify what you are currently succeeding in, as well as identify areas of improvement, therefore forming new strategies and business ideas.

Click-through-rate and conversions – Google Analytics

Click-through rate (CTR) and conversions on Google Analytics can also measure brand performance.

CTR refers to the number of clicks that your ad receives which is then divided by the number of times your ad is shown. This can be used to gain an understanding of how your keywords, paid ads and keywords are currently ranking. Discovering how your brand currently ranks is a great way to see which competitors are performing better than you, and where you are excelling. Tracking keyword movements can also help you see how changes to your marketing techniques are affecting the rankings.

Conversions can be set up to measure things like purchases, clicks on a certain page e.g. contact page, or when a user completes a certain event such as filling out a form. You can explore what pages people are landing on before leading to a conversion and pick out what pages may need improvements such as the navigation, internal linking, or any user experience issues.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console can show impressions, these show the key terms people have searched for and how many times your site has been shown based on these searches.

For example, your site may have shown up 1,000 times for the term ‘Bed manufacturer London’. This can help you identify what key terms you are ranking for, what is correctly being targeted, and what needs to be improved. For instance, you might be showing a large number of impressions for a search term you aren’t wanting or aim to rank for.

The above brand performance indicators can identify how well your brand performs in certain industries amid different audiences. All of these methods can measure search performance and volumes for your brand name, product name, and other variations.

Survey Monkey

Using a survey or questionnaire tool such as Survey Monkey can be a great and efficient way to get a larger number of responses and opinions on an upcoming product or service.

Showing examples of copy, asking questions based on brand awareness, and asking consumers to rate from 1-10 on user experience features can help gauge what needs to be improved and therefore increase your brand performance.

Examples of brand purpose marketing

Nepa and GANT

GANT chose Nepa to help their market growth. Starting with understanding GANTs main competitors and current market techniques, Nepa underwent a deep dive in order to understand and pick out the areas of potential growth.

Nepa then established their core KPIs in order to form key assessment criteria for their new continuous health trackers. This method covered 11 markets and resulted in 24/7 data tracking.

Find out more about this case study and its success here.

Keeping Kellogg’s relevant

Nepa worked with Kellogg’s to relaunch their Pringles range. Using marketing intelligence tools and omnichannel paths, Nepa was able to target a wider audience, focusing on a range of marketing channels. This market research increased their brand performance with effective propositions and marketing, resulting in large net worldwide sales.

Read more about Kellogg’s case study here.

Glossiers’ UGC strategy

Glossier made its marketing activities an investment priority, heavily focusing on social media marketing in the last year or so. They used platforms such as Instagram to communicate and reward their consumers as well as broadcast their values. This form of marketing through user-generated content creates a trustworthy brand and can see consumers identifying more with people who use the same platform as themselves.

Using social media to showcase their products from influencers and celebrities, they managed to avoid involving external partners to sell their products, and their tactics paid off, with sales increasing as well as their brand performance and awareness.

Source: https://www.launchmetrics.com/resources/blog/what-is-brand-performance

VARNER retail company

Nepa managed to uncover hidden opportunities working with VARNER. They are a Scandinavian-based company that consists of many retail chains such as LEVIS and Dressmann.

By understanding how each individual retail brand performed in their current markets using a continuous brand tracker, as well as having regular insight meetings using the data collected, Nepa managed to explore new business ideas through current trends and hot topics, resulting in the discovery of missed opportunities for growth.

This resulted in positive adjustments to business strategies and processes as well as areas of action.

Read more about VARNER and Nepa’s partnership here.

Increase your brand performance today

If you’re looking to increase your brand performance marketing through effective strategies such as brand tracking and data collection, then Nepa can guide you through the process. We are market research and data tracking experts, using brand performance indicators to identify new opportunities and potential weaknesses.

Stand out from your competitors with brand asset optimisation. Nepa can help you identify your brands’ attributes and current reputation and use this to increase your business’s assets.

Contact us today for more information, or take a look at our case studies to explore recent success stories.