What is brand profiling, and how could it benefit you?

Brand Profiling is a useful technique to understand what customers and prospective customers think about your business and more specifically what they think about your brand.

Rather than talking just to your existing customers, with brand profiling we collect the views of your potential customers. For bricks and mortar companies, this would be in the local areas you serve; for fully online businesses it might be a much wider target audience, probably the whole of the UK.

Instead of focusing on metrics such as how satisfied your customers are with your service, this kind of research is more strategic in nature. So, it can be used to answer questions such as:

• Are you positioning your brand and services to match your target market’s needs and expectations?

• How does my business fit within the competitive marketplace?

• How well known am I compared to other businesses like mine?

• Do people know all the services/products we offer?

• What do people think of my logo?

• What brand characteristics do people associate with my business?

It’s an incredibly flexible and versatile research method, typically collected via an online survey targeted at the kind of people you want to talk to. That might simply be all adults living close to your business or it could be much more tightly targeted by criteria such as life stage, profession or socio-economic grouping.

At Know Your Market we have a few ways to go about collecting this kind of data for you. In BC times (before Covid) a traditional but effective method was to talk to people in the town where your business is based and run through the survey face to face.

These days we’re much more likely to use social media like Facebook and Instagram alongside our mystery shoppers database to target the area and demographic you want to talk to and then collect responses via an online survey link.

We manage the whole process for you: from survey design and programming through to managing the social media activity and collecting and analysing the data. Depending on what you need, we can provide simple tabulations for each question or create a bespoke report drawing out the findings for you and making recommendations.

I can’t over-estimate the value of this kind of research. Without checking how you are perceived in terms of brand positioning and how your business fits within the competitive landscape, you are effectively marketing your business with a blindfold on.

If you would like to talk about how brand profiling can help your business, please get in touch.