What are the top market research tools for analyzing brand perception?

Generative AI allows us to mine the entire Internet to understand what a brand stands for and how it compares to its competitors. Gen AI does a remarkably good job at teasing out the key sentiments, associations and offer suggestions on how to grow a brand without having to speak to human beings. It also helps us break free from the constraints of a traditional survey with a battery of statements that are usually narrow and framed in words that are not necessarily the words consumers use to describe your brand. Gen AI has the power to be more comprehensive and generate the words that are more organic. Brand managers can use that to their advantage to grow new associations and distinctiveness more effectively

Today this is true, but it is changing. The rise of GAI tools has changed everything. Surveys as an instrument were created to enable brands to have a conversation at scale. Today, GAI unlocks this ability. It will likely take 3 years, but soon likert scales will be replaced by AI interviewing humans and then decision makers having a conversation with their qual data but at quant scale.

Survey & Feedback Tools (Active Research): SurveyMonkey/Qualtrics/QuestionPro: Build targeted surveys to understand brand associations, customer satisfaction, and brand awareness. Social Listening Tools (Passive Research): Brandwatch/Sprout Social: Track online conversations about your brand across social media to uncover sentiment and brand perception. Google Trends/Social Mention: Analyze search trends and social media mentions to see how brand perception evolves over time.

Surveys are one way to get a response about a pre-determined set of brand attributes/ claims/ benefits/ associations or statements and gauges how well the target audience respond to those statements or points. At its best it is measuring whether you brand is recognised as having the associations you want it to have, at worst it is a waste of money

Brand perception can be measured by: 1. NPS as a measure of likelihood to recommend the brand to others. 2. Brand Awareness as a % of consumers who recognize or recall a specific brand. 3. Through Purchase Intent - Measured as the likelihood that consumers will buy a brand’s products or services. 4. Positive, negative or neutral sentiments towards a brand. 5. Customers' engagement with a brand via metrics like usage, downloads, shares, likes, etc. 6. Customer Ratings on Review platforms. 7. Through change in customer attitudes measured via brand tracking over time. 8. Market penetration data 9. Repeat Purchase data 10. Customer Experience metrics like CES or CSAT 11. Brand valuation models The above are a shortlist and there can be more.

Social listening is a seductive technique for a marketer to use to "listen to what their customers are discussing", except of course that the online/ social media discussions most easily monitored are not necessarily representative of the brand's customer base. So it's an interesting sample of what some people are talking about, but can miss much.

It used to be the case that you researchers selected their focus group participants to represent their market, e.g. if you had a group of 10 and were a CPG you might have a group composition like... 6 White 3 Hispanic 2 Black 1 Asian Today, we know better. If you truly want the POV of the market by ethnicity or age, you have to homogenize your groups. For example, use a black moderator and have all your participants be black.

Qualitative discussions is the technique to really explore the perceptions of the target audience regarding the brand. Increasingly this doesn't have to be a physical "group" anymore and can be achieved with online and mobile discussion forums - which have the advantage of being less about a moment in time as the data can be gathered over a longer period of time

For small companies, customer feedback is given in the form of public facing reviews. These reviews are seen as marketing as opposed to true feedback that is actioned by the company. True market research is expensive and, thus, usually left to the Fortune 2000.

Customer feedback is an often under appreciated part of a comprehensive monitoring of a brands' reputation and brand associations. Use customer care centres, complaint mechanism and other connections to existing customers to get an ongoing sense of their unprompted associations with the brand rather than just asking them about them about what the marketers want or assume to be those associations

Use the other sources of feedback to help structure what you track about competitor brands - yes that includes the key values and associations your strategy indicates are important but also has space for the things that emerge as being important for the category's customers

I agree, those are good hard measures. And I think the addition of key unbiased soft measures round out the analysis. The best “new” way to garner an unbiased picture of the competitive landscape is to use AI to ingest the entire public web of information and parse out organic conversation and sentiments of your brand and its competitors. Tools like @lyrical.ai leverage the best AI models do this without having to ask a single direct question of your audience. You can even use tools like @evidenza.ai to hold virtual focus groups using synthetic versions of your ICP. The key is, what are people saying about you and others when no one is asking.

As Jeff Bezos has famously said, "When the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." Today it has never been easier to analyze qualitative data. Traditionally, we include very few open ended questions and only use them for pull quotes that support the POV that comes out of the quant. We do this because analyzing unstructured data is hard. But, today, it has never been easier. Using tools like Voxpopme, you can have a conversation with your data that is backup by real consumers...not just AI.