Marketing Performance

3 — Insights: Discover what really matters to consumers to sharpen your proposition

Why do insights matter?

You think you own your brand, but you don't. Customers do at least as much as you do. Their perception determines what your brand can do: the competitors it can outperform, the products it can support, the price premium it can generate. And because customers own your brand, you cannot afford to steer it inside-out, or at least not exclusively. No brand can be everything to all people. On the contrary. The sharper the profile of your brand, and the more differentiated its proposition, the bigger your chance is to stand out from the crowd. The flipside is that even a strong brand will wear out if it is spread too thin, be it by trying to compete in too many different categories, or by targeting too many different customer segments. So to maximize the value of your brand – and the return on your marketing investment – you need to understand what customers really want, to what extent they are getting it from your brand, and how you can keep them coming back for more.

You may think brand success is all about the media budget, but it isn't. Message beats media. Understanding what customers need will not only help you optimize the positioning of your brand, it will also enable you to send the right kind of messages – messages that resonate with your target audience and put your marketing dollars to good use. Even the biggest activation budget will evaporate if you don't use ...