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Brand Research

Create a strong, distinctive brand

Understand how your audience thinks and feels about your brand to build loyalty, recommendation and additional revenue opportunities.

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Identify and measure your KPIs

Implement a clear performance tracking strategy to demonstrate ROI

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Evaluate the power of your brand

Find out what’s working and deliver value to customers. Test, track, repeat

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Grow your brand and your business

Adapt to changing preferences and enter new markets

How can we help you?

Brand tracking and testing:

  • Brand trackers and health checks – measuring the impact of your brand-building efforts over time with regular, ongoing checks so you can adapt / react to changes relating to awareness or perception
  • Campaign evaluation or brand lift studies – measuring the impact and success of a campaign on your brand
  • Brand asset, messaging and ad testing – logos, advertisement

Building and developing your brand:

  • Competitor analysis and positioning incl. brand mapping – identifying brand attributes and understanding perceptions, associations and emotions in your competitive landscape
  • Pricing research
  • Product development
  • Brand consideration, preference and penetration
  • Brand trust, loyalty, retention and advocacy (e.g. Net Promoter Score)
  • Brand equity index
  • Brand identity & exploration

Our bespoke market research services provide the insights you need to highlight:

  • Awareness and visibility levels, and how these differ by audience group
  • The characteristics of your brand
  • The implications of brand architecture
  • Competitive threats and opportunities, and how how your brand differentiates from the rest of the market
  • What customers value in a brand and how your brand can be positioned to address customers’ needs
  • The impact and success of your marketing & PR activities on key brand metrics
  • Usage and consideration levels for your brand, as well as trust and loyalty
  • How your brand should develop (e.g. due to changing opinions, changing market) and any other changes over time as the above is tracked on a regular basis

Why should you do it?

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A brand’s perception is not owned by the brand itself

Your brand is not defined just by your products or services – it is owned by your customer, based on how they see and feel it.

Brands aren’t static, and peoples’ opinions of them change over time

There’s nothing new about this but, what is new, is the speed with which opinions and attitudes towards a brand and the competitive landscape change. Being aware of this and evaluating your brand is critical to ensure it remains relevant and appealing.

Read the full tutorial

At Sapio Research, we have a wealth of experience conducting brand understanding research.

Our team of qualitative and quantitative researchers can help you gain a deeper insight, so feel free to click on our case studies below to see some of our work, and to contact us with any questions.

Testimonials

Sapio Research has been a great partner across several of our global research projects. They are clear, responsive, and genuinely easy to work with.

More importantly, they are very reliable when it comes to deadlines, sample quality, and the accuracy of the data.

We always feel confident using the results they deliver, whether for reports, media outreach, or broader communications campaigns.

Kristina Shingareva
Corporate Communications Director
Regula

Testimonials

Sapio Research has been an exceptional partner for DoubleVerify’s global research initiatives over the past several years. Sapio’s expertise in conducting multi-national custom research has consistently delivered high-quality insights that help us provide actionable intelligence to our clients.

What sets Sapio Research apart is their methodological rigor and ability to execute complex custom research projects with precision across diverse markets. Their teams are always willing to get creative and simplify the process for us. Their collaborative approach makes them easy to work with, and the insights generated through our partnership continue to inform strategic decisions across the digital advertising industry.

I highly recommend Sapio Research to any organization seeking a research partner that combines global reach with unwavering commitment to quality.

Collette Spagnolo
VP, Marketing, Integrated Marketing and Analytics
DoubleVerify

Testimonials

Working with the team at Sapio Research was such a great experience. From our first call, and all throughout the process, they were extremely helpful, knowledgeable and very responsive. The team provided great insight into our project from the start, which was really helpful given we were taking this survey from a North American focus to a global audience. The presentations and report have gotten a lot of interest and have been well received. We have other teams working with them and would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone. Thank you Sapio Research for all your support and we look forward to working with you again.

Shelley Hutchinson
Marketing Communications Manager, Canada
Fortinet Training Institute

Testimonials

Archetype UK has worked with Sapio Research for over five years. In that time, we’ve collaborated on a raft of local and international projects; delivering credible third-party research to support us with data for client PR, content and digital campaigns as well as insight and intelligence for new business proposals. We’ve worked together on large scale consumer campaigns, smaller more niche studies talking to business and technology decision makers and a hybrid of the two – some of which are now in their third or fourth annual iterations.
The Sapio Research team not only combine expertise and understanding with impressive client service but are hugely collaborative. They are a boutique research house and with that comes a level of attentiveness, agility, flexibility and partnership that you don’t always find with larger corporations. They are always willing to brainstorm, help iterate or evolve approaches and have helped to upskill our teams on optimising our research questionnaires to reach our desired output. A particular talent which stands them out from competitors is their attention to detail and survey-flow optimisation; they catch errors and inconsistencies and reword and restructure surveys to get the most from the question numbers, all while maintaining high levels methodological integrity.
As a team, we’ve been able to add considerable value to our own proposals and we’ve also found a trusted partner we can recommend for our clients looking to undertake their own research campaigns. We recommend them very highly.

Holly Jefferies
Associate Director
Archetype

Testimonials

The work Sapio Research carried out has given us clearer visibility on our customers views and perceptions. It has enabled our organisation to have an increased focus on the areas that really matter to our customers and to also celebrate the positive feedback that we received as part of the process

Richard Morgan
Head of Customer Experience
Equans

Testimonials

As a workplace strategy consultancy, engaging effectively with our client’s employees is critical and Sapio Research is our go-to supplier for staff surveys. The process is always stress-free and turnaround times for both building the survey and providing the results data are very quick. I particularly appreciate the way Sapio Research demonstrate a real concern for quality and frequently make helpful suggestions regarding question formats or raise a query if something doesn’t look right in the question set. I have found them to be unfailingly helpful and responsive and would not hesitate to recommend them.

Judy Gavan
Associate Director
HCG

Testimonials

Sapio Research were a brilliant partner for our Electric is Now project, helping us hone the perfect survey to tap into UK consumers’ barriers, motivators and sources of influence when it comes to the purchase of electric vehicles. The resulting report has formed the linchpin of our agency’s new business strategy, with the accompanying launch event generating many leads, one of which has been converted into a piece of new business already!

Hannah Baker
Marketing and New Business Director
Foxtrot Papa Agency

Testimonials

As a novel start-up in a poorly-researched space, we needed to validate the problems Whirli is solving. Sapio Research were fantastic partners from start to finish – creative in brainstorming angles, careful in designing the questions, and rigorous in analysing the results. The research brought a wealth of insights, backed by hard figures, for our business decision making and for us to talk about publicly in the press.

Nigel Phan
Founder
Whirli

Case Studies

B2B
Equans
Equans
The brief Equans is a global market leader in the sector with 74,000 employees leveraging 200 years of expertise.  In the UK & Ireland, Equans is a...
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Consumer
Storm12
Storm12
The brief A property developer in the South of England was preparing to launch a new brand, directed at a young, social and trendy audience,...
Read more
B2B
Kimberly-Clark Professional
Kimberly-Clark Professional
The brief Kimberly-Clark Professional partners with businesses to create "Exceptional Workplaces", helping make them healthier, safer and more productive. It manufactures and supplies out of...
Read more
Consumer
Flight Club
Flight Club
The brief A themed London based bar wanted to launch the brand in new cities and locations. It wanted to do this in an elegant,...
Read more
Praxis Medicare
Praxis Medicare
The brief The start-up Praxis Medicare was looking to understand the market opportunity for a digital healthcare technology solution. Designed to help organisations (particularly SMEs),...
Read more

Frequently asked questions

  • What can you find out with Brand Research?

    • The impact and success of marketing & PR activity on key brand metrics
    • Awareness and visibility levels and how these differ by audience group
    • The characteristics of your brand
    • How your brand differentiates from the rest of the market
    • What customers value in a brand
    • How your brand can be positioned to address customers’ needs
    • Consideration levels for your brand
    • Competitive threats and opportunities
    • How the brand should develop (e.g. due to changing opinions, changing market)
    • Implications of brand architecture.
    • Changes over time as the above is tracked on a regular basis

  • What metrics can be measured in Brand Research?

    • Unprompted and Prompted awareness levels
    • Brand Sentiment (positive or negative association)
    • Brand Usage and Consideration
    • Brand Preference
    • Brand Trust and Loyalty (e.g. Net Promoter Score)
    • Brand Associations (and in comparison to competitors)
    • Competitive Landscape Mapping

  • Brand trackers – advice and good practice

    Frequency

    We recommend that B2B Brand Trackers are repeated once per year.
    If these are run more frequently, it could be difficult to see significant changes in results between waves. With consumer studies, running trackers more regularly is easier, because of the large sample sizes – with B2B it’s often not possible to get similar sample sizes. If brand trackers are run less frequently than once per year, it may be difficult to react to changes, and data used may be outdated.

    Target audience

    The survey target audience is crucial for the success of a Brand Tracker, but also causes difficulties in the feasibility of studies if it is a niche cohort.
    The survey must target customer personas, and not include those that will have little awareness / knowledge of the brand / other competitors in question. This means that the roles, responsibilities, markets, types of company etc. must be defined and targeted to get valid data. However, if the size of the audience in the real-world is very small, then conducting the research with a robust sample size may be difficult.

    Recommended methodology

    Running the research using online panels is the preferred methodology, but telephone interviews or a mixed approach is also possible.
    Online panels offer a quick and more cost-effective way of reaching the target audience, but if an audience is niche, it may not be possible. By using a telephone interviewing approach it may be possible to reach more of the target audience, however it is often costly (approx. 10-15 times the cost of an online interview).

    Sample size

    • 1000 responses – a very good sample size in a B2B market. Allows good comparison between competitors, and a high validity. May also allow sub-sector analysis by country, company size, and sector
    • 500 responses – a good sample size in a B2B market. Allows good comparison between competitors, and a reasonable validity. May be a challenge to run sub-group analysis
    • 250 responses – a reasonable sample size in a B2B market. Allows some comparison between the main competitors, but if tracked, differences over time may be difficult to validate
    • Fewer than 250 responses – a small sample size in a B2B market. This will give a snapshot of the sector and competitors – comparison between competitors may be difficult, and tracking over time will have challenges. However, can still be a good investment if just a snapshot is required

  • Can you interview my customers or my potential customers / can I use my own database? (brand research)

    Yes - sample can be supplemented from your own customer and prospect contact databases.
    However, this data needs to be segmented as those who are on databases are more likely to be aware of the brand in question, and have biases towards them. If the audience is particularly niche however, and the main objectives is to understand what other competitors are out there, as well as how the brand is perceived, this data can still have value.

    We are the experts for this type of research and can certainly do this in the UK or internationally - please get in touch so we can advise the best approach.

  • When is the right time to deploy qualitative research for my brand?

    1. During the brand development process (early stage) - Qualitative techniques like projective exercises and brand collages can help identify the optimal brand positioning, messaging, and visual identity that resonates with the target B2B audience.
    2. When engaging internal stakeholders for buy-ins (early stage) - Findings from qualitative research can be used to get buy-ins from internal stakeholders on marketing campaigns. Understanding key reasons and emotions behind decisions being made can be the make-or-break factor in many purchase decisions.
    3. When defining your market research objectives (mid-stage) - Often, what you’re looking for can get muddled with what your target audience is looking for. Conducting qualitative research early on can redeem deeper insights into your problems and help you redefine your objectives.
    4. When validating quantitative findings (mid-stage) - Qualitative research can be used to validate and provide context for quantitative brand research, as well as generate compelling quotes, case studies, and stories to bring the data to life.
    5. When trying to break down your brand architecture (late stage) - As you grow as a company or a brand, you will tend to expand your offerings. Sometimes, it’ll be under your brand’s umbrella, and sometimes, they’ll branch out due to mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures. That’s when it becomes increasingly important for your target audience to associate with the correct brand.
      Qualitative research allows you to explore brand perceptions in-depth. Because qualitative techniques are more exploratory, you can go beyond superficial statements to identify the underlying emotional reaction to brands.

    Read more about qualitative research and the right timing here

Need help figuring out the research you need?

Contact us

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