The Hindu Business Line : Researching brand equity

Millward Brown, the WPP group company, has developed tools that enable marketers to glean insights into what makes brands tick and measure performance and growth.

Neerja Wable, Senior Vice-President, IMRB

THE changing nature of brands has a number of direct implications for research needs. The WPP company, Millward Brown's tools catering to brand equity brought in through IMRB in India have led the latter to brand its offerings under the Millward Brown banner for both its qualitative and quantitative research across the sub-continent. States Neerja Wable, Senior Vice-President, IMRB, "We still need all the research examining brand functionality that we would have needed 40 years ago. We still need retail audits, we still need product tests to understand the reality of what we are working with. But as brands evolve into experience and meaning, we need much more besides that."

With exactly these criteria in mind, Millward Brown has developed a brand equity research tool that is valid, predictive and diagnostic with global applicability - BrandDynamics. In studies that have covered 15,000 brands across 30 countries since 1998, Millward Brown has a vast accumulated database that has enabled it to glean insights about what makes brands tick and help marketers measure the performance and maximise the growth of their brands. Also with the study, eight broad types of brands which face different marketing challenges have been identified. These are:

Olympic - well-known, well-loved, part of everyday life and the cultural fabric of the country

Classic - well-known, well-loved, have a relatively large core following; good but not great

Aspirational - well-known but not suitable for a mass audience - often too expensive

Cult - not widely known and not suitable for a mass audience but has a committed and fanatical following

Little Tiger - relatively unknown but with a strong following amongst a core group

Defender - usually an established brand without the competitive advantage of leaders

Fading Star - still well-known and relevant but has lost appeal and offers no distinct advantage

Clean State - little known, irrelevant to most consumers and with few advantages

Adds Wable, "While BrandDynamics allows us to classify brands in a way which indicates their immediate fate, no brand is guaranteed growth. However strong a position they are in today, even Olypmic brands can decline.

To drive growth in share, action is needed, so any brand equity system must provide clear guidelines for that action."

BrandDynamics allows us to understand the source of a brand's strength or weakness so as to provide that guidance. While each study is uniquely tailored to the client's brand set and the recommendations are equally unique to each brand's situation, a general overview of marketing implications for each type of brand is possible.

According to Wable, tracking of these brands has also provided some interesting learnings about how brands grow or decline overtime. What was interesting was that only a third of the roughly 1,200 brands followed the intuitive path of a brand cycle - Clean Slates through Little Tigers to Olympics before fading away and passing on. Nearly "two-thirds" bucked the expected trend. Another observation was that nearly half the brands changed their equity classification within a year, implying that creating and maintaining brand equity require constant vigilance and a system of regular measurement and monitoring.

While understanding the brand is of prime importance, making the most of your communications budget is also explored by BrandDynamics which places brands on the map of presence and equity (voltage) and thereby influences decisions on the communications strategy.

Explains Sue Gardiner, Joint Managing Director, Millward Brown, UK, "Through an understanding of the relationship between the generation of awareness and conversion to trial for different consumer categories, we offer insights into the likely time-frame in which consumers will respond."

According to the BrandDynamics model, the relationship between brand awareness and trial builds more slowly in more considered purchases, and is almost linear in impulse categories. As awareness of pure impulse products grows, so do trials. However, it takes much longer for products such as personal products to convert awareness to trial. Also, financial categories need a greater degree of awareness before conversion to trial. Thus there are clear implications from these different category studies in terms of timing of potential return on media investment.

So the communication task needs to be set on the basis of the brand's position and its category dynamics, and consumer response is key to achieving this goal.

But the obvious question remains - if consumer response is so important, why is it not built into the understanding and planning for all communication budgets? Says Gardiner, "The answer is that it's complex to do so - and falling back to general guidelines and received wisdom is easier. The reality is that if analyses of consumer response were to be used in the planning process to a much greater extent than currently happens, communication budgets could be better deployed.

There are three areas where Millward Brown techniques can be effectively deployed. Apart from the trademark tool of BrandDynamics which is used to set the communication task relative to the overall brand needs, there are techniques like Link and Multimedia Link for predicting ad awareness. In order to anticipate consumer response in relation to brand targets, Link and Multimedialink pre-tests can enable clients to build consumer response directly into the communication planning process. Another patented tool is ATP Analyses, which is used to take total brand communication awareness forward into the longer term to relate it both to brand consideration and to sales.

Adds Gardiner, "All our evidence suggests there is a close relationship between high executional impact and brand effects in both short and the long terms. We have new analysis approaches in our media ATP that can help predict long-term advertising effects in conjunction with the contribution of key business basics such as price and distribution."

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