OUR PHILOSOPHY
instinct and reason has developed an approach that proves the role brand plays in customer choice and shows while price generally dominates brand is a solid contributor. Of course this differs by brand and market segment.
As David Aaker said in a recent article “Brands matter, but their value is difficult to quantify. It requires different time periods and/or different markets in which brand equity has experienced significant change. Those contexts are not usually easy to come by. In the absence of experimental or statistical evidence, we are back to conceptualizing the role of brand equity just as those justifying investments in people, IT and organizational culture do. But it is reassuring to know the solid evidence exists to support the general assertion that brand investments, on average, have been shown to pay off”.
instinct and reason also believe that brands work at the visceral level. They work in the gut and so are hard to quantify. A brand not only influences the product and service choice of customers but also the customer journey and the experiences they have. This is because a brand is real and is lived out in the way the organisation and its employees interact with customers. instinct and reason frame the customer journey from the customer’s standpoint and disassemble it into the ‘jobs’ that a customer perceives they have to do to get to where they want to be. Each ’job’ is a series of interactions with particular experiences which generate feelings that get remembered.
HOW WE DO IT
The extensive use of qualitative techniques that enable people to describe how they feel when experiencing a journey as a customer combined with extensive use of discrete choice modelling has allowed us to deduce the role brand plays in human choice.
In marketing experiments, rather than ask the consumer to accurately score the role brand plays in their choice of product or service, instinct and reason embeds product and service choice in a range of different and hypothetical buying scenarios that includes brands so we are able to deduce the relative influence of brand compared to price and other buying factors.
instinct and reason also strongly believes that both brand and the customer journey or customer experience are also deeply affected by the feelings engendered by the brand. We have specialist qualitative techniques that make use of archetypes as a corridor of discovery to uncover the deep emotional connections and responses of customers and use these research practices to enhance the high end marketing experiments we perform.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR CLIENTS
Clients are able to quantify the power of their brand to drive a premium price, whether to retire brands or what would be the likely success of the launch of a new brand.
We have conducted brand work for St.George Bank, CBA, ING DIRECT, the National Heart Foundation, Cancer Council, Lend Lease, Snowy Hydro, William Hill, Syngenta and many others.
The framework used by instinct and reason in its other customer journey research undertaken for organisations like IAG, NRMA, ING DIRECT, Coal Services, Teacher Housing Authority, Medicare Australia, and many others always frames the customer journey as being ‘the jobs/tasks that customers need to undertake to get what they want done’.
