Spread the Word

by Ken Roberts, President

Most smart brands conduct an ongoing Brand Health Tracker (BHT). These studies measure brand and advertising awareness, message delivery, competitive impact, brand relevance, brand imagery, purchase likelihood, likelihood-to-recommend (see our story from Q2 of 2007), and a profile of target consumers.

Brand Health Tracking remains as important today as it was many years ago. These studies take the pulse of the brand, and can detect early symptoms of potential brand issues. With the rapid change in the world of media, BHTs have adapted to address this. They now include some questioning about the impact of the Internet on the brand - but they can fail to dig deep enough. Media has become extremely fragmented, and there have been huge shifts in consumer behavior. Consumer opinions are more trusted than company advertisements. Consumers are driving brand perception, purchase intent, and market value. To address this, some companies have started incorporating Blog Analysis to help monitor brand health. But is that enough? What about social networking sites, message boards, user review sites, podcasts, and the instantaneity of online media?

We have partnered with Andiamo! Systems, specialists in Word of Mouth Measurement techniques, to fill this gap. This program collects both mainstream and user generated media as frequently as desired to round out the findings gleaned from more traditional quantitative research. A combination of technology and human review ensures the accuracy, authority, integrity and relevance of the information. Word of Mouth data can be delivered in raw form (through a dashboard), or rolled into other research reports that highlight key indicators and suggest lines of action.

We agree with Andiamo!’s assertion that “the decision of whether or not to employ word of mouth measurement within an organization will soon disappear. The decision will be to find the [WoM] solution that best fits the needs of the business, based largely on the volume of WoM, the competitive situation of the business and the extent to which WoM drives brand and enterprise value.”

To learn more about how Word of Mouth measurement can give you a more complete picture of the health of your brand, send us an email or visit our Web site.

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Tech Tips: Gender Quotas

by Bob McGinn, Senior Project Director

A potential new client recently came to us wanting to do a product concept test among 400 respondents in their target audience. The first questions we typically ask when working with a client are “who is your target audience?” and “what is the audience’s age, gender, socio-economic status, etc.?” In this case, the prospective client already knew who their target audience was – if they hadn’t, this would be a totally different article.

After talking to the client in more detail, we learned the gender break out for their target audience was roughly 50% male and 50% female. Upon hearing this, we quickly advised that we would need to set a gender quota of 50% male and 50% female to ensure an even break – if not, we could expect to end up with more females. They were curious as to why this would need to happen. We explained that males and females typically have different response rates, and that the rate for females tends to be higher.

Even though we can control the number of invites sent to each particular group, we cannot control the rate at which they will open their email, click on a survey link, or complete a survey. If the client did not set a gender quota from the beginning, they would inevitably end up with more females and would not have a representative sample of their target audience. This would leave the client open for challenges to the findings from a methodological standpoint, which is a position we never want our clients to be in. By locking in a quota that matches the audience demographic, we can be sure that the response we receive represents the audience appropriately.

For more information about gender quotas, send us an email or visit our Web site.

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Forwarded...

So this one's been out there for a while, but we thought it appropriate - err, maybe inappropriate - anyway. Thanks to Kevin Feenan for this anecdote that illustrates a by-gone era of door-to-door research. See the original post here.

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