Building a Brand Research Strategy For Your Brand
Starting with  How to Analyze Your Brand?
 
Brand research assists with the creation, development, and strengthening of brands. Using a variety of methods, researchers can uncover a range of insights.
 
Undertaking brand research will help to uncover the health of your brand. A business’s potential can be maximized by identifying threats and opportunities.
You can understand if your customers are aligned with your values. The position you occupy in the in the marketplace is important too, as is the health of your competitors.
What is brand research?
Brand research assists with the creation, development, and ongoing management and strengthening of brands.
Analysis can be carried out to understand the landscape and develop a launch strategy. Brand research can also be conducted after launch to assist in the development of brand assets.
For more established businesses, brand research can be used periodically, or continually, to track consumers awareness, perceptions, and experience.
 

As with any research, the most robust methodology will include information taken from multiple sources. Some will be easier or cheaper to obtain than others, but investing wisely means you will develop a more detailed picture of the landscape and reduce the possibilities for bias that are inherent in any form of research.

The good old fashioned survey is still a great source of consumer views on brands and product categories, and can be useful regardless of what development stage the brand is at.
You can conduct surveys in person, by telephone or online. Each has its own set of biases that researchers have to be aware of.
Surveys can provide the quantitative insights for brand research, understanding consumer views on a larger scale. SurveyMonkey is probably the most well known and popular online survey software.

Bringing different types of people, from customers to employees, into a workshop can bring some qualitative insights into the research mix. Asking open-ended questions allows you to gain deeper perceptions, opinions and emotional responses to your brand, product or service.
Twitter recently launched a service that turns 12,000 users into a quick research panel, allowing brands to gauge what a cross section of consumers thinks of a campaign or product. The service can be used before or during campaigns, offering focus group insights at speed and without using the same level of resources.

Any customer facing employee should have some insight into what prospects and customers think of your brand. Salespeople, account managers, shop assistants and customer service representatives will all have stories from the front line that can add to the qualitative research.

Social intelligence offers a unique blend of research. Used well, it can offer a mix of the qualitative and quantitative. The organic nature of conversations reduces response bias found in surveys while the volume of conversations means that you are not limited to a specific set of questions. You simply need to devise the methodology to best answer the questions you’d like answered while also being able to find aspects of the conversation you hadn’t anticipated.
While collecting social media metrics for campaign monitoring has long been a popular use case, deeper business insights can also be found. Even brands at pre-launch or relatively new or small brands with lower volumes of conversation can gain insights by looking at broad topics and types of conversation. Segmenting the data using tags and categories is vital for highlighting relevant information in your data.

With surveys and focus groups you can obviously just ask people the questions, although you need to design the questions to reduce bias where possible and keep them open ended. With social intelligence, you also have to design your methodology. One advantage is that you may come across insights you hadn’t previously considered.