Momentive webinar on monitoring brand performance during a economic downturn
Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
On March 15, Momentive’s Alexis White, market research program director, professional services and Mikolka Morrill, product manager gave a webinar on monitoring brand performance during an economic downturn.
You'll discover how to:
- Track your brand performance and monitor changes over time.
- Identify potential problem areas from demographic shift.
- Launch studies that provide ongoing, real-time insights into brand health and market trends.
Watch the webinar recording or read through the transcript below.
Webinar transcription:
Joe Rydholm:
Hi everybody and welcome to our webinar “How to Monitor Brand Performance During a Downturn.” I’m Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm and before we get started just wanted to quickly go over the ways to participate in today’s discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to our presenter during the session and we’ll answer as many as possible in the Q&A portion after the presentation. Our session today is presented by Momentive. Enjoy the webinar!
Mikolka Morrill:
Alright, well, let's go ahead and get started here. Thank you all so much for joining myself and Alexis here today.
Today's webinar, we are going to be talking about how to monitor brand performance during a downturn. We're going to cover a couple of different things but first off, my name is Mikolka Morrill. I'm a product manager on our brand tracking product. I've been with Momentive for just under four years and actually started in the XM space in the experience management. And with me is Alexis.
Alexis White:
Hi everyone. My name is Alexis White. I'm the market research program director here at Momentive. I've been with the [organization] for a little over a year, and I sit on our expert services team where we consult customers every day on market research best practices.
Today we actually plan to provide you all with an overview of our Momentive solutions, give you an update on our new research and product developments and review our branch tracking methodology.
With that said, I'll turn things over to Miko to review our solutions.
Mikolka Morrill:
Perfect. Now, most of you probably have heard of Momentive or at least of SurveyMonkey and what comes to mind is often more casual surveys, surveys that are done maybe at work to get perspective on a change that's recently been implemented.
In some cases, something like COVID questions, asking whether you're ready to go into the office, things along those lines. But there's actually an entire suite of solutions that are a part of Momentive that are directly focused on market research and they cover a vast breadth of different use cases, different situations.
The first and most obvious one are market insights. So this is just getting a better understanding of the market as a whole, learning more about the organizations that you potentially compete against, how they're doing, how various perceptions are going on and really just be able to understand things quickly.
The second one and what we'll really be focusing on primarily today is brand insights. So understanding how your brand is working against your competitors. How are people interpreting the ads that you're putting out there? Are they having a noticeable and meaningful brand lift when you're spending the thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get people to really understand who you are and what you're trying to do? And then we pair that with our professional services team.
So Alexis's team on our expert services who really work on ensuring that the questionnaires that you're putting out there are best practices that are asking the questions that are going to give you actual actionable insights but also team members on our customer success to ensure that the data is getting to where it needs to go, that you're able to tie this in with other places.
And of course if you have any questions, if you have someone that you can go to and actually start talking about or talking with, excuse me.
And then on the other side of the house, it's the customer experience. And this is a combination of both our market research solutions and understanding where you are within the market, but also how are your current customers doing? How can we pair that data together in such a way that allows you to better understand the current customers are coming back, they love us and they love everything that we're doing. And for the people that we're going out there, we have the right perception. People know who we are, they know what we do, they know why we do it and most importantly that they want to work with us, they want to come back, they want to continue to work with us.
Underneath all of that is our AI powered platform, and you'll see this in various places throughout all of our products, but it's really the ability to be able to learn what you don't know to ask about.
It's pulling out insights about a particular segment that maybe you haven't spent time diving into. The goal, ultimately, is to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to be able to understand your data and then take action on it from there.
So as Alexis outlined today, we're going to primarily be focused and talking about the brand tracker and specifically with all of the kind of macroeconomic aspects that are tying into it, how you need to adapt your brand trackers, whether you're running one now or whether you're thinking about it the future, how you need to adapt those, what kind of questions you need to be asking, what kind of deeper analysis can you actually do in there?
Okay, so now that you have a good understanding of everything that we offer on the product side I want to quickly talk about the Momentive Way.
So what we've seen in the market and really not what we've seen, but what Market Research insights has really kind of pulled out is that the investment in self-service brand tracking is growing quite dramatically. The days of sending things off to an agency and having them come back once a quarter or once every half year or even sometimes once a year and giving you some broad set of insights, it's just not the reality of what we're dealing with right now. Things are moving quickly and customer perceptions change quite dramatically.
We can see things in the media where maybe a CEO goes out and says something or there's something that occurs related to, I don't know, the environment or really just the macroeconomic scale of things that are happening right now. And that suddenly changes perceptions in a very dramatic way. And if you are running your brand tracking on an annual basis, things will change, sales will change.Folks that are willing to work with you and to actually come back and want to spend additional money with your organization are changing faster than on that annual time basis.
And so what more and more organizations are moving towards is our self-service solutions where they're pairing with professional services, they're still getting some of those deeper insights and some more complex data analysis from those professional services teams. But when someone in your [organization] comes to you and says, ‘Hey, I need to know whether this latest thing that happened has impacted our brand,’ you're able to go out, feel the wave, get that data back and take a look at it in a very quick and meaningful way.
And as Pavi Gupta said, the head of insights at J&J the future is speed. Speed, speed tech is going to become the core of the evolution of the insights industry.
And I think probably for most of you that are here, you already know this because you're listening to this webinar and we do really thank you for being here and kind of letting us walk you through all of this.
But the reality is that what has been historically done just isn't going to cut it anymore. You've got to be able to move more quickly and be able to come up with these insights more effectively.
So with that, the Momentive Way and really what we're talking about here is how we approach this problem. How do we outline the different sections and the ways to kind of talk about and examine brand tracking. So with that, I'm going to kick it over to Alexis here.
Alexis White:
Thanks, Miko. At Momentive, our team of market researchers and product experts have come up with a three-step approach to brand tracking. Beginning with our short evaluation criteria, we like to assess our customer's brand tracking readiness by outlining target sample, competitive set research goals and overall survey cadence.
Once we're able to align on these elements, we like to consult our customers on their survey instrument at Momentive. We have actually designed questionnaire templates based off of brand maturity and industry.
Our expert services team uses those instruments as a starting point to consult our customers on best research practices after we've aligned on sample research objectives, survey tools and our customer can then sit back and watch as the insights come in.
Our tool offers real-time insights and standardized dashboards to capture key brand tracking elements including brand funnel, category attributes, competitive intelligence and campaign awareness to name a few.
Our expert services team can design customized dashboards to fit all of our customers' needs. With that said, I'm going to pass it over to Miko so we can start to dig into our technology to help you with brand tracking.
Mikolka Morrill:
Perfect. Thanks, Alexis.
Yeah, so I'm going to walk you all through just a quick overview of what our Brand Tracker looks like. Kind of call out some of the things that our customers really enjoy working with and are helping them understand various pieces of. So let me go ahead and switch over to that, which you can see here.
So, what you're looking at here is probably unlike what you've seen before from Momentive if you've ever used SurveyMonkey or Momentive in the past. But what we are taking a look at is the Brand Tracker specific product, which allows you to map all of your data and information in a way that makes it a lot easier to actually dive deep into it to better understand statistical significance and changes over time, mapping longitudinal data and then actually being able to compare various sections or filter for various groups.
So, here we've got something fairly obvious. We've got our brand funnel which is showing a combination of our awareness, familiarity, consideration, choice, usage and then most often usage, which are all tying together to give you a really good understanding of people that have heard of you, all the way down to those who actually use you and who use you a lot.
As you can see, we've got a number of different visualizations that we can actually pull from here. We can take a look at things as sort of line charts switch over to bar charts and even data tables.
When we do want to take a look at some of the more specifics that are going on behind we can see those changes over time and the statistical significance of changes against our current state.
We also enable aided and unaided awareness.
So, with our unaided awareness, when you're trying to understand just when people think of surveys, what are the names that come to their mind? We have matching to bring in names that maybe are similar but not quite the same.
And then on our aided awareness where you're actually prompting folks with the questions that they need, or excuse me, with the brands that they may know about, which ones do you know? Which ones do you not know?
So, in all the brand directing tool here is designed to enable both market researchers and anyone in the CX or insight space to be able to understand changes over time, those longitudinal changes to being able to dive deeper understanding a particular segment, a particular group and we're going to talk about that and show that in just a minute here.
But other than this kind of overview, I do just want to call out. You do of course have the flexibility to create various dashboards to share information out with others. You could export your data at any time if you want to marry it up with any other information or demographic information, or potentially leverage a typing tool to add segmentation to your groups.
So, as with everything Momentive and SurveyMonkey based, we are really trying to give you the flexibility to understand your data quickly and easily as well as enable you to do the analysis you need within the platform, but also not keep you locked in, give you the flexibility to go outside of it.
Now, all that being said at this point I want to stop the screen share and really just talk with you, Alexis, a little bit about some of the things that our expert services are doing and really tying back into the title of our webinar here with a recession coming up, what are some of the things that people need to be thinking about working on all that kind of good stuff.
So yeah, with that sort of macroeconomic environment, what are some of the key metrics that people should be thinking about and tracking?
Alexis White:
Gotcha. Well, that's a really great question Miko.
First off, every person in the insights, brand health, brand tracking perception needs to keep an eye on awareness and trust during a recession.
Honing in on brand awareness is key to recovery. When economic conditions improve, consumers are going to return to the brands they recognize and trust. So, keeping a pulse on those metrics will prepare you once the economy turns around.
In addition to brand awareness and trust, companies should also keep a pulse on their brand perception. This is important because as budgets go down, brand perception could be changing as foods. Start to think about more cost effective brands and ways to spend their money.
Finally, make sure you have a barometer on your ads and be careful of pivoting your market strategies. This is not the time to completely do a 180 on your brand and your ads and your marketing. This is the time to be a little cautious and start to think strategically about what you're putting into the market.
Mikolka Morrill:
So I guess, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see when folks are pivoting or I guess what's even driving folks to make those pivots?
Alexis White:
Gotcha.
So time and time again, we see brands overspending in low spend environments and they ultimately have to make up for lost ground. To avoid this, your company should consider doing a little bit of testing such as using our products, such as content testing and an idea screener.
And don't change things up too much just because your competitors are, this is the time to be cautious. This is the time to pressure test before you release new ideas into the industry.
Mikolka Morrill:
Cool. Okay.
So let's say now that we're keeping track of all those pieces, an organization does have a barometer on that. They are kind of measuring the trust and all the elements you kind of outlined there. You've got these studies going out on the right cadence, the right cadence may depend on who you are and what you're looking for and things along those lines. But let's just say for simplicity's sake it's the right cadence. What are some of the most important ways that you actually start slicing and dicing this data? How do you want to analyze it?
Alexis White:
Gotcha. So that's a really great question. We always recommend to our customers to pay attention to changes over time.
Brand tracking is a longitudinal study. Whether your cadence is monthly, biannually or annually, you want to keep track of all of those changes you are seeing over time.
In addition, you want to filter down into your key target segments. If you see there are changes in trust, let's go ahead and dig down into what demographics are aiding in that change. Maybe it's your core consumer target sample or maybe it's your competitors.
Using our tool allows you to filter in on demographics, target samples and even channel consumptions to really see what is actually driving some of these changes. In addition to you want to look out for outliers time and time again, you might see changes in some of your metrics and it could just be due to an anomaly or maybe an outside group you've never kept track of.
As we've seen in COVID with consumers changing the way they interact with brands, the way they purchase with brands, we've seen a huge segment of folks kind of gravitate to different brands that we've never seen before. So paying attention to those outliers that maybe didn't prepare for is going to be essential to tracking your brand health perception.
Mikolka Morrill:
That makes a lot of sense.
And from a product perspective, I'll say that's something that we have really tried to build into the product.
So, if I start my screen share here for just a quick second, you can actually see all of those filters that you want to bring over. We can start applying those different demographic filters, whether it's gender, age, location, whatever the case may be, you have the flexibility to actually apply those filters and then look at the changes in the data from those different points.
One other thing that I think that our customers really enjoy doing is actually using the compare function as well.
So, let's say we want to compare different target audiences or different questions and answers.
In our case, we only have one target audience for this tracker, so that wouldn't be particularly insightful at this point. But let's say that we want to compare folks that have used survey tools versus email management and chat box tools.
We can go ahead and apply those filters. We can see all of them kind of keeping track in here and then we're going to be able to actually analyze this data as it pops up, see some comparisons over time, see these different groups compared over time, and then where there are statistically significant differences, actually call those out to you.
So here we can see all these different pieces significantly higher or significantly lower than various groups. This is going to give you that kind of what you just outlined, Alexis, that ability to carve through the data a little bit more significantly.
Alexis White:
I'm actually happy you showed us how to do this within our tool. One of the things you touched on earlier in our conversation, and I think it's important to highlight, is that all of this could be done self-service, correct? Our customers can actually go into the tool and segment the data how they choose to.
Mikolka Morrill:
Absolutely, absolutely. That's the whole goal of a self-service tool here.
Alexis White:
That's amazing. That's amazing. As we think about the economic downturn, I'm sure a lot of our customers would value being able to get those quick insights on their own instead of waiting the weeks and months that agencies generally have for a turnaround time.
Mikolka Morrill:
Well, and if we're kind of getting down to the details of it, it's also the cost of having them go in and pull out a particular insight.
Let's say that you're sitting in a meeting and someone says, boy, that's all really interesting, but I don't care about survey tools versus chat management. I want to know about our people that use time management and task project that's not now an email that you need to send to your agency to actually send out, have them dig up the data and then send it back to you, which could take anywhere from on a very good day, maybe a day, but in reality we're probably looking at multiple days to a week. You can literally pull it up and start looking at those comparisons right in here. So giving you that ease of use along with the flexibility and then obviously all of the expert services that your team provides and the insights that they're going to recommend and help them get to.
Alexis White:
Gotcha. Thanks, Niko.
Mikolka Morrill:
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's say now we've identified these things. We've actually carved through this data whether we did it, whether you did it, whether the professional services team did it or whether your intern did it. The point is you've now carved through this information, you have some understanding.
A lot of the time what we will hear from customers is like, okay, my unaided awareness has gone down, or one of my pieces has gone down. What do I do to dive deeper? What are some of the insights that I can ask? What are the other questions that I can ask to understand a little bit more in depth?
Alexis White:
Great question, Miko.
So, one of the most obvious solutions I always give our customers is to do a key driver analysis.
Let's see what demographic groups are driving those changes? What other metrics are possibly driving changes that you're seeing in your brand tracker? It's not the end all be all, but it's a really great starting point. We're starting to carve out the why behind some of the changes that we're seeing.
In addition to doing your own statistical analysis, I always recommend we do some secondary research to figure out what are your competitors doing? How is the space changing over time?
That can be done via our expert services team. Our team can actually help curate pulse quantitative studies on the competitive landscape of your brand, on particular metrics to really tease out the why behind a lot of the brand health tracking changes.
We can then use a lot of that data to inform your brand health tracking study as well as update some of your competitive set and attribute questions.
Mikolka Morrill:
Perfect. And I think that that kind of ties in also with some of the compare by piece that I was showing there, being able to compare those different groups and then look at the insights or the statistical differences between those groups in there. That all kind of makes a lot of sense here.
So I guess as kind of the final piece we've gathered the data, we've analyzed the data, or at least we've carved through it a little bit. We've got a professional services team that can help us go a little bit deeper.
Just from your personal perspective, in terms of actioning, what are some of the actions that folks can take? What are the changes that you do wave over wave, I guess, what do you advise when someone says, okay, great, I know that the female population has dropped by 5% in our aided awareness and we want to impact that. I guess what do we do from that point forward?
Alexis White:
That's a really great question, Miko. I always tell folks the brand health tracker is really great for answering the, where it's going to give you data on research objectives, but to really answer what's going on with your business, you have to look internally before looking externally.
And what that means is thinking about how are you investing in marketing for the female who is driving down some awareness or unheated awareness? Let's think about where your investment strategy is. Have you changed your channel in which you're like placing ads or collaborating with influencers? If so, that could be driving down your awareness amongst some of these key segments in addition to have you thought about how you have pivoted your marketing strategies? Have you decreased spending in certain areas? Maybe you no longer are partnering with certain other organizations.
The great thing about brand health tracking, it'll tell you where these changes are being heavily impacted, but you have to look internally, look at your cross-functional partners, look at your product team, your marketing team, your comms team to see what changes they have made that might be impacting your brand health tracking metrics over time.
Mikolka Morrill:
That makes total sense. That makes total, there's only so much we know at the end of the day within something like this, you can collect the market data, but everything that's happening within the org is a little bit of a black box. You have to be able to marry those two things up. You can't just look at 'em within their own silos because there's no way to draw those conclusions.
Excellent. Well, I think that covers most of what we were planning on going through today.
Ultimately, I again, really appreciate all of you taking the time to join us today and kind of walk through this.
We hopefully have been answering questions throughout this whole time. If there are any other questions, we'll leave this open for just an extra minute or two if you do want to drop those in.
And then of course we will be following up in the not so distant future with both the recording of the webinar as well as some follow up information about both the brand tracking and some of our other market research solutions.
We incidentally am very excited to say just released our Van Westendorp solution. So if you're thinking about doing any sort of price sensitivity, understanding how much you should be charging for your medium plan we've got the solution to help you there as well as concept testing.
So, I think Alexis actually mentioned it earlier, but being able to measure different ads, put that barometer in place to understand what ads are resonating with different groups, which ones are going to have the biggest impact for the least amount of costs, things along those lines. Our concept testing solution will work with you there.
And then of course, Alexis's wonderful and exceptional team is there to work alongside you on all of the expert solutions that we provide.
So with that thank you so much from myself and Alexis. I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to say.
Alexis White:
No, I'm just very grateful you all have taken the time to listen to us talk about brand tracking and our other solutions.
As Miko mentioned the team of expert services, we're always here to consult you on our brand tracking solution as well as some of our other solutions such as concept testing and idea screeners.
So we're really excited to collaborate with you all.
Mikolka Morrill:
All right, thanks so much and we'll see you next time.