Marketing & Brand Management
It is widely believed that marketing and branding efforts, especially advertising, affect consumer behavior. A social media influencer does an Instagram story on a product from a brand (big or small) and its sales surge. A shoe brand launches a new sneaker and hundreds of people line up outside from dawn. Digital dominates marketing at most middle eastern brands today. However, an increasing number of brands have been telling us they are struggling to justify the ROI on digital spend. Why is it so? It is primarily because contrary to the popular belief, it is consumer behaviors that affects branding and marketing and not vice versa.
What used to be a bit of a stab in the dark, is now becoming a precision exercise that needs to be carried out based on accurate, real-time consumer data and insights. The environment resulting from Covid-19 has imposed financial challenges on consumers. This in turn has intensified the battle for a share of consumers’ minds and wallets. Accuracy of marketing has therefore become an even bigger responsibility for brands.
The real power of great branding efforts lies in a brand’s ability to learn consumer behaviors and to use this learning to craft powerful brand stories for key target audiences.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into the different aspects of branding that you can positively affect by knowing your consumer’s behavior and tailoring your efforts to it.
1. Segmentation, targeting, and positioning
Earlier on, I talked about an increasing detachment between brands and consumers. Are you one such brand? If so, a key reason could be that you are segmenting your target audience based on customer personas drawn up using psychographics. This approach works well for advertising purposes at best but doesn’t tell you about consumers’ purchase intentions and usage behaviors.
The thing is – every consumer uses your products to satisfy a specific need. If you really want to reach the right consumers for your products and services, you need to focus on your consumers’ needs, which in turn are driven by their behavior. It is therefore pertinent that brands gather relevant data about which benefits and features matter to your customers, what value do they assign to the price they pay for your products, what are the unique advantages and key disadvantages they believe exist in your products, and which personal, social, political, and other factors positively or negatively affect their purchase and usage patterns.
2. Brand Equity measurements
There are different ways to measure brand equity, measuring the financial value of brand equity being the most common. Measuring consumer-based brand equity (or CBBE), if done right, can be even more effective. CBBE provides a view of a brand’s success or failure from the viewpoint of its customers and general consumers at large. Two of the the most well-known models to measure consumer-based brand equity are the Keller Model by Professor Kevin Lane Keller and the Aaker’s Model by Professor David Aaker.
According to Aaker, there are five components to brand equity: brand awareness, brand loyalty, perceived quality, brand associations, and proprietary assets. To measure four of these five pillars, you need to analyse your customers’ buying behavior and understand overall consumer behavior.
Muhimma helps a number of brands measure their 3600 consumer-based brand equity using our community of thousands of real consumers across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Measured on an ongoing basis, we provide detailed insights on the category, the competitive landscape, and your brand.
3. Advertising and content marketing
Content marketing is the most effective route to reach your audience. Content marketing requires brands to think like newspaper and magazine publishers who would predict the information needs of their readers and publish stories to address those needs.
In today’s digital world of social media where consumers are presented with thousands of ads every day, it is becoming increasingly difficult for content marketers to stand out amid clutter. The only way is to learn the information needs of consumers, and craft compelling stories to tailor the content to those needs. The emphasis here is to focus on the message, rather than the digital channel. Your content should help your customer make better-informed decisions, and in order to do that, you need to know what questions they have and what problems around products or services they’d like to have solved. It’s one thing to write great content, but it’ll mean nothing if no one is reading it.
According to research by Accenture, 41% of customers switched companies because there wasn’t enough personalization. You can’t personalize your content unless you understand what makes your customers tick. Ask yourself, did your audience want to know about the subject in the first place, or did you think it was important? Is what you’ve written actually helping your audience solve a problem or understand a topic better? Upselling or cross-selling also becomes easier when you understand your customers and can remove any roadblocks that are in the way of fulfilling their information needs.
4. New product development
Thousands of products and services are introduced in the market every year. However, as much as 80% of these products fail to get consumer approval. Why? The primary reason is that these products fail to solve an unknown or an unserved customer need. With so many products already on the shelf and so much advertising around these products, how does a new product or a service grab consumers’ attention? Picture your product & service innovation in terms of customer needs in the following graph.
To design valuable products and experiences, brands need to design products which solve a consumer need that at times consumers don’t know themselves exists but feel a vacuum of. Learning consumer needs that they are trying to fulfil when they use a product and getting first-hand information about the features and benefits they expect against what they get in current products and services is the key. The better consumer needs are identified, the better brands are in a position to design products that consumers love.
5. Competition analysis
Any competition analysis and competitive landscaping exercise is incomplete without leaving consumer views out of the equation. You’d want to know what, if any, products or services customers are buying from your competitors, and what they think of those products. You can use that information to identify gaps in your competitors’ products and services and create better products or services that really solve real customers’ issues. It’s all about creating loyal customers who prefer your brand and products over others in the same market.
Are you ready to base your business decisions on first-hand insights from real consumers across KSA and UAE?
Try Muhimma out for free today.
