Your Brand, in the Words of Your Consumer
	MARKET MOTIVATORS

A large, multi-national beverage client was struggling with the question: do consumers see us the way we ask them to in our communications?

Their belief was that consumers do not have a clear picture of their brand and what it represents. The Pert Group was asked for a creative research method that would provide a realistic and quantifiable way to measure consumers’ relationships with the brand.

The client was concerned about the limitations of traditional qualitative techniques, so The Pert Group recommended an exclusively licensed approach. Called Emotional Monitoring, it allows consumers to describe the vision they have of the brand in their own words. This had many advantages:

• By asking consumers to envision the world of the brand in all its aspects (environment, society, people and values) and to describe the person who loves the brand, we determined themes of consumers’ relationships to the brand.
• These themes were quantified by grouping together like-minded consumers. Each theme was expressed in a world of values and personality profiles, which were mapped to show the dominant divisions of the consumer relationship.

Our findings unveiled subtle but critical opposing consumer viewpoints on the brand: a view of elegance and true sophistication versus one of ostentation and status-seeking. With the brand platform based in elegance and festivities, this raised a true positioning question for the client.

As a result, our recommendations were:

• To increase emphasis of the inherent integrity that consumers see in the brand, a key characteristic of the brand persona that had been unrecognized up to this point.
• To be conscious of avoiding superficiality and ostentation.

With these recommendations in hand, the client was able to work with their communications agency to bring nuance to their creative work with the goal of moving more consumers into the desired brand world.