Traditional inquiry yields statistically reliable and valid answers…to meaningless questions.

What's the alternative? First, identify the goal of your research which, in our opinion, must be to learn:

• What people think — as opposed to what they say they think.
• "How high is up" for customer expectations in your category.
• How the purchase decision for your category is really made.

To attain this goal, you need:

• To be able to measure the direction and velocity of category values and customer values.
• To know what customers and prospects are willing to believe about your brand.
• To understand how customers view the category, compare offerings in the category and, ultimately, buy in the category.

How Brand Keys measures customer loyalty.

We start with a proprietary questionnaire. It is based on established, empirically proven psychological-testing instruments. Instead of asking questions like "Are you happy with this product?", it employs "personification" techniques. A respondent might, for example, be asked

"If Absolut vodka were a person, would it tend to plan things in advance
or do things on the spur of the moment?"

Or

"If Mercedes-Benz were a person,
would it like to chat in a group or one-on-one?"

Any one of these questions, by itself, is more or less meaningless (if not downright absurd). But put together a set of the right questions and, if you know how to read the results, you have an extremely detailed look at an individual's relationship to the person, place or thing being personified. Most important, because our questionnaire is a subtle psychological probe, not a blunt instrument, you will know what respondents really feel, not just what they say they feel.

We generally conduct polls by phone, although we can also do them online, by mail, in person, or in any other reasonable manner. We interview people who have bought our client's product or service and, if the client so requests, customers of competing brands. The methodology is so powerful that a relatively small number of respondents yields reliable, generalizable results. Our measurements are scientifically validated via a national probability sample in the US and UK, with statistical reliability at the 95% confidence level. It has been further tested in 23 countries around the world, with similar results. The seminal 1990 Advertising Research Foundation Copy Research Validity Project study showed that no theoretical framework — including persuasion measures — is more highly correlated with sales than ours.

If this were all there was to it, anyone with a moderate amount of training in psychological testing — and access to a worldwide field-research infrastructure — could do what we do. But there is one more crucial step without which the raw survey results would be worthless to our clients: the weightings.

The formulas that translate the undigested survey data into the weighted results we provide our clients were painstakingly developed over a period of years by Dr. Passikoff and a team of statisticians and computer analysts. These proprietary algorithms, as central to Brand Keys as the secret syrup formula is to Coca-Cola, are at the heart of what we do. And, as no one else has managed to crack the code, they are the reason no other firm in the world can deliver a research product as powerful as ours.

What we deliver to our clients.

Brand Keys is a consultancy. As such, we enter into a consultative relationship with our clients, and no two relationships are the same. That being said, here is a minimalist description of the contents of a Brand Keys study:

• A breakdown of your category's loyalty drivers — the specific values, benefits and features that drive purchase, define brand equity, and emotionally bond customers to a brand.
• Charts plotting the precise hierarchy of loyalty drivers in the category, including a look at the drivers behind
  • The category "ideal"
  • Your brand
  • Competing brands
• Analysis of your core brand equity, derived from the relationship between your customers' expectations (as expressed by the category ideal) and the manner in which your brand meets or exceeds those expectations.
• Analysis of your brand's strengths and weaknesses vs. the competition.
• An inventory of the specific product values and attributes that compose each loyalty driver in your category (the lower-order components of each higher-order driver).

These measures provide an intimate understanding of the values that drive customer loyalty in your category. From here it is a straightforward step to formulate every type of brand and marketing initiative, from creative direction to communications strategies to packaging to strategic planning all the way to retooling the product or service. And, because in the real world budgets are limited, the measures make it easy to allocate budgets and decide which initiatives are necessary immediately and which can wait, or even be ignored.

Clearly, this information is valuable to all our clients, not just those with high loyalty scores.

About the category "ideal."

We are often asked how our respondents formulate the category ideal, and what qualifies them for the job. It's a good question. Obviously, the vast majority of participants in any of our surveys will not be employed in the category. This would be a problem if we were asking people, for instance, to sit down and design the ideal computer, candy bar or insurance policy. But, remember, we do not ask direct questions. Respondents characterize their ideal computer, candy bar or insurance policy the same way they characterize actual brands: by personification. The result — the category ideal — is a detailed picture of what people are willing to believe about a brand in the category.

One example of how this works: In the mid 1990s, Brand Keys did a quarterly series of minivan surveys for the Chrysler Corporation. The results were relatively stable over the course of the first several studies. Then something changed. In personifying the ideal van, respondents suddenly had significantly higher expectations regarding a value we identified as "accessibility."

In presenting the results, we did not attempt to pin a specific meaning on this value, believing it could correspond to a number of minivan attributes and features. To their credit, the Chrysler people quickly drew their own inference: to meet the newly elevated expectations for accessibility, they would engineer and build the first four-door vans in the marketplace.

Chrysler Corporation's four-door minivans were an unqualified success. It took the competition two to three years to catch up.

• Captured customer values long before they would have appeared on the radar screen of conventional research;
• Showed what people were really thinking about, perhaps before they consciously knew what they were thinking about;
• Revealed values and emotions that are inaccessible to the direct questions of conventional research.

Assessing your ROI...fast.

Most corporate initiatives cannot be properly assessed until sales and profit results are analyzed. This often means a lag of anywhere from a couple of quarters to a year or more before it is possible to assess an initiative's return on investment — by which time it may be too late to reverse an unacceptably low ROI.

One of the great benefits of the Brand Keys methodology is that our measures correlate directly to sales in the marketplace. This gives our clients a non-transactional — and much faster — way to answer such questions as "What am I getting for my advertising, marketing and public-relations dollars?", or "Are the new products (or services or features) succeeding in the marketplace?", or "Should we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to introduce a new burger for adults?"

The classic indicator of a corporation's financial health is its price-to-earnings ratio, as calculated by the formula:

A similar logic yields the ROI of any corporate initiative. We start by measuring brand equity (the relationship between your brand's loyalty-driver curve and the ideal curve) before and after customers are exposed to the initiative. Then, by dividing the "after" measure with the "before" measure, we obtain a precise quantitative measure of the initiative's ROI (which we call the Brand Multiple):

The Brand Multiple can be calculated within weeks of an initiative's launch; it can even be calculated before an initiative's launch. This allows our clients to swiftly overhaul or retract low-Brand Multiple initiatives before wasting too much money and effort, and to throw more marketing weight behind initiatives whose Brand Multiple indicates a strong potential for a hit in the marketplace.

In summary.

We firmly believe there is no better way to leverage customer loyalty than to integrate Brand Keys metrics into your company's planning processes. Get in touch with us. We'll be happy to show you what we can do.

Courtesy of Brand Keys