BRAND TRACKING SURVEY

The Brief

All too few businesses and brands make time for decent diagnosis as the vital stage before strategy, but Stibo are one of them.

They came to Gasp for guidance and insight on understanding how their customers and market perceived their brand, how it is perceived in relation to their competitors, how effective their distinctive brand assets are, and how this all in turn impacted the sales funnel.

There was also a vague perception, to be investigated and diagnosed further, that the sales team was not operating as well as they could be.

Stibo Systems is a master data management company, enabling businesses and global brands like Sony, Toyota and Adidas to optimize their business, environmental and social performance.

The Response

We set about constructing a brand survey. Its genius and effectiveness lay in its perfect simplicity, and the resulting intel gives a business so much, forming the backbone for good planning and strategy:

• Brand awareness
• The rest of the sales funnel
• Conversion rates through the funnel, and those of your competitors.
• Brand image scores for you and your competitors
• What drives and reduces consideration, preference and purchase.
• Baselines for your objectives and annual tracking.

A set of very tight and well-considered hierarchy of questions built us a complete and highly-instructive sales funnel to give us a market view through Awareness – Consideration – Preference – Purchase. The questions were designed to illicit key information around segmentation, awareness, and measuring Stibo’s brand associations and how these associations stack up compared to their competitors, as all as giving us a very clear insight into what was driving the different stages in the funnel.

A crucial question for any business is; when comparing yourself to your competitors, where do you sit? This survey allowed Stibo to find out who they needed to worry about as a threat, who to leave alone, who to choose to go head-to-head with in the market. To basically make intelligent marketing decisions. It also facilitates the tailoring of messaging accordingly, in terms of positioning against a certain competitor.

Being truly market-orientated means you can make eye-opening discoveries as regards brand attributes. What you may have always assumed was how you are perceived (such as being expensive) could in fact be entirely different. A re-affirming of brand attributes gives sales guys confidence in what they are selling.

We also carried out Share of Search, which is gaining increasing scholarly momentum and is based on Google search data, for an accurate and cost-effective way to measure Stibo’s Share of Market in relation to their 3 main competitors.

*Funnel measure shown for illustrative purposes only

*Attribute measures shown for illustrative purposes only

*Correlation Coefficients shown for illustrative purposes only

The Results

A deceptively simply survey gave Stibo so much. It helped set tangible, realistic business targets and forecasts, for example in Stibo’s case; “Increasing awareness by 2% would have an expected return of £2.4m”.

It is something that can be repeated every year as it is such a robust process and whoever puts this in place for a brand or business can expect a huge feeling of empowerment.

As regards the potential issue with the sales team, it became apparent that sales were in fact doing a good job converting 50% of awareness into consideration, but they were hampered at the very top and bottom of the funnel by very limited awareness and significant issues closing.

This survey is vital for understanding the holes in the sales funnel, its strengths and weaknesses. It also gives baselines for all future brand SMART objectives and the chance to re-visit your strategy and should be the marketer’s bible for having a good year.

"From our early conversations with Gasp, it was clear that they are true experts in their field. Their approach of Research/Diagnosis – Strategy – Tactics pervades through all that they do and was exactly what we needed. In fact, it is what every business needs, as it is clear to us now that it is the only way to do marketing. The crucial insight the research and survey provided has helped shape our future strategy and comms, so has been vitally important" - Marketing Director, EMEA