Turn your brand data into brand intelligence

A recent Forrester study has confirmed that marketers tend to prioritize access to data over data analysis:  while 69% of respondents said that “easy access to all media and customer data” is an extremely or very important component of marketing intelligence, only 47% said the same for “tools to enable activation of insights.”

The study goes on to state:

“Effective marketing intelligence not only measures past performance, but enables a full view of the customer journey enabling real time optimization for improved performance”

At Attest, everything we do is focused on giving you the brand intelligence you need to generate growth. This means marketing intelligence is baked into our products and never more than a filter swipe or radio button click away when you are analysing your results.

In this article we will be looking at the results from a survey for EVE mattresses to demonstrate the use of a simple matrix to convert data into intelligence. Access to the full data set we will be using can be found here. It may be helpful to have this open in another window as you read on.

The Brand Intelligence Matrix

Below we have taken the brand intelligence data and converted into a simple brand S.W.O.T matrix. S.W.O.T. is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT matrix in this context is a way to represent your brand’s greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a way that allows you to quickly focus and prioritise your brand strategy.

Traditionally Stregths and weaknesses are internal factors, such as product quality and reputation. Opportunities and threats tend to be external such as competitor performance or pricing. Strengths and weaknesses can be directly controlled and altered, whilst opportunities and threats need to be navigated towards or around. 

The purpose of brand intelligence matrix is the following:

1. Gain a snapshot of brand performance, so the effectiveness of brand-related activity can be accurately quantified and measured over the upcoming quarters. No brand can improve on all aspects of their strategy at once. Understanding where your brand is strong, and where it needs work can avoid wasting time and budget.
2. Quickly identify and prioritise areas of focus for the brand and marketing team. Without this focus it can be difficult to manage and motivate larger brand teams to keep everyone on-message throughout the quarter. This focus and the data behind the prioritisation is a key part of securing additional budget where required.
3. Measure your progress. The real value of any audit, and the key to gaining intelligence, is to repeat the process on a regular basis. The purpose of this is to measure the impact of your actions, and the actions of your competitors, against your desired results. Are you making the most of your opportunities? Are you nullifying any threats to your brand?

Strengths

The great news for Eve Mattresses is that this survey unearths a huge win for them, as they are sitting on a market-leading product.  Eve Mattress comfortably outscored their main rival Simba in consumer perception of comfort (lowest score = highest rank), whilst scored less positively in terms of perceived affordability.

Opportunities

Eve has plenty of areas in which they have a decent level of performance that can be improved upon. Firstly in terms of Brand recognition, Eve was the 4th most recognised brand behind Simba, Tempur and Silent Night. 

Which of these mattress brands do you recognise? (Select all that apply)

Of the people surveyed that are considering a mattress purchase in the next 6 months, 33% have interacted with the Eve brand in the last month in a way that has positively impacted their purchasing decision making process. Whilst this is excellence news, there are still 60% of potential purchasers whom could be influenced to increase brand recognition and purchase intent.  

Price has been included as an opportunity, because whilst only 11% of consumers described Eve Matresses as affordable vs 14% for Simba, my research today has shown Eve to be slighly cheaper across multiple models compared to Simba. There is clearly an opportunity here to bridge perception with reality when it comes to their messaging.

Weaknesses

It’s important to remember when anlaysing perceived weaknesses that these could also be described as really big opportunities. It depends which side you have got out of bed. The clear area for Eve to work on here is Market Penetration. Only 8% of consumers surveyed have purchased an Eve mattress, this is a benchmark that is understandable given Eve’s challenger brand status, but should be closely monitored to ensure it is always increasing, and at satisfactroy speed. 

Threats

Eve has a Net Promoter Score of -58.1 vs Simba’s -53.9. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend a company’s products or services.

Customers are asked:On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Company A’s product or service to a friend or a colleague? The responses are then pooled into 3 sections:

0-6 = Detractors – unlikely to purchase the product again, and may actually damage the brand’s reputation.

7-8 = Passives – not so dissatisfied as to bad-mouth the brand, but not satisfied enough to actually recommend it.

9-10 = Promoters – brand evangelists who repeatedly buy the product or service, and are extremely likely to recommend it to people.

This gives the ‘raw’ data from which the NPS can be calculated. To get the NPS, you must subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

You then have an NPS: an index ranging from -100 to 100, typically expressed as a percentage.

Eve’s NPS score of -58.1 in comparison to Simba’s -53.9 means on average consumers were slightly more likely to recommend their competitor’s product to friends. Whilst this is currently a tiny difference, almost negligible, product evangelism is so fundamental to the success of any challenger brand that Eve should focus on how Simba have achieved this and put in place strategies to increase the advocacy of their customers.

This requires particular focus given the stregth of Eve’s product, customer journey analysis should be undertaken to unearth pain or friction points for customers, as well as review of the effectiveness of any incentives to share Eve’s products targeted at existing customers. This would be the priority for me along with exploiting the perceived strong performance of the product in branded communications.