Indiantelevision.com Team

( 27 February 2009 5:20 pm)

Mumbai: Building relationships between brands and consumers is extremely essential in measuring a product's brand behaviour and, hence, brand effectiveness.

Elaborating on this, Synovate brand and communications thought leader and director of innovation Dr Jan Hofmeyr said, "With advances in neuropsychology and non-linear mathematics, we are able to dig much deeper into how consumers mind reacts to communication and how it can create associations with a product that is important to them. We have also discovered particularly with long term brand campaigns, the human brain changes by communication that makes connections with consumer's life experiences."

Experiential marketing, Hofmeyr noted, is a very concentrated and intense method for building brand connections as the process has the potential to create opportunities for brand consumption that are in marketers' control.

"Embedding the brand in managed experiences can create connections that build relationships. Moreover, over a longer period, it's helpful to integrate the desired brand image/ feelings into brand communications. It's also important to match the brand with images you want to be associated with and then repeat," Hofmeyr explained.

Hofmeyr also emphasised on the need to creating a more holistic paradigm of brand value. It is important to measure brand equity (read attitudinal equity), he noted, as it is the most validated measure of brand value linking brand involvement with brand behaviour.

This measure, according to him, performs much superior to any other measure of brand equity due to the fact that it not only takes into account the competitive context but also accounts for what is already on the consumer's mind.

Meanwhile, the industry also orates that apart from consumer relationships, brand performance too is an important function that affects consumption patterns. And market barriers such as distribution, pricing and product configuration could impact customers' brand choice too.

"For years marketers have known that whether or not people buy their brands, it's not just a function of how people feel about the brands, but also the extent to which market circumstances might interfere with what people want. And this can actually be quantified and linked to real world business outcomes," Hofmeyr added.

The ongoing recession fever has also had its impact on consumers' buying patterns leading to an increased demand for providing more for less to clients facing reduced budgets.
Therefore, to address the plight of market research spenders in the current recessionary phase, Synovate has come up with an innovation code named Nano. The innovation will offer an integrated brand equity and communications tracker, brand equity and customer experience tracker and equity and shopper survey.

"Clients who are looking to understand multiple business issues from the same surveys, for example a method to integrate behavioural loyalty studies with brand equity measurement, Nano will address these demands by making techniques available to clients in a format that drives out costs in delivery whilst maintaining the quality of insight," said Synovate India managing director Mick Gordon.