Brand Strategy

People’s behaviour is undergoing a revolution fostered by technology and globalisation, which makes it challenging to manage brands. Ipsos helps you to build stronger brands in today’s increasingly complex world.

Client context

How can I identify the key drivers to build a strong brand equity?
What are the key parameters needed to structure my brand portfolio?
How can I optimise my brand portfolio to maximise sales?
What potential categories should my brand stretch to?
What are the unmet needs to leverage for innovations?

Solutions

Ipsos experts help you to build stronger brands by strengthening your brand equity, defining the best positioning and managing your portfolio. We also conduct motivational research in a systematic way by unraveling both emotional and functional consumer needs using our Censydiam compass.

We focus on:

Brand Equity & Positioning

We link brand equity drivers to clear business outcomes, allowing us to model potential scenarios for brand growth. This provides you with a clear perspective on future growth opportunities.

Portfolio Management

Our solution will depend heavily on the specific actions standards required. Apart from our research capabilities, we strongly rely on our consultative approach and collaboration with the client through stakeholder interviews and workshops.

Brand Stretch and Innovation

As a first step we help identify and quantify the key insights and opportunities for the brand. Next we use these insights as a springboard to develop new ideas, concepts and products, which can be then be tested and validated on their potential to grow your business. This requires a strong connection between our various units combining contextual information, consumer research, ideation and testing.

Understanding Consumer Motivations with Censydiam

Censydiam is our psychological framework used to explore consumer motivations in a systematic way by unraveling both emotional and functional consumer needs. It is an approach which can be used to understand how to create relevance for your brands or to identify what associations and benefits to use in concept development and communications so consumers can more easily connect with your brand.

Censydiam Options:

Brand Dip: A concise device-agnostic tool to test the waters on your brand, enabling you to make decisions fast.
Censydiam Social: A tool for understanding consumer motivations in online conversations to ensure your brand is delivering the right social media content in the right channel.
Censydiam Needs Clip-On: A plugin solution to give a first feel on the key needs in your category by targets or specific occasions without having to run a segmentation.

Click here to read the case study

Case studies

Bringing emotion to banking: Banking in Thailand is becoming very competitive with each bank trying to develop a unique positioning. Our client’s brand was performing well, but our client felt that the current brand strategy, which focused on functional benefits, had reached its maturity. The client needed to know how to strengthen the brand and gain more share. We leveraged our proprietary Censydiam model to add a more emotional set of drivers to the existing functional benefits. As these drivers were linked to current business success, Ipsos was able to simulate the potential gain in market share.

Improving and activating musical brands: A musical instrument client had built a strong portfolio of brands over the years. Yet they were struggling with what brands to prioritize and how best to activate the brands on a global level. Using our needs-based Censydiam model we were able to identify the tensions and gaps in the client’s portfolio, as well as the best unique platform for each brand. This formed the basis for further fine-tuning of the brand DNA, as well as direction for activation, including communication, and distribution.

Stretching to new categories: Facing increased competition, market maturity and commoditisation in the padlocks category, our client wanted to explore extending the brand into the broader Safety & Security category. The client had already identified some categories where he felt that significant growth was possible. So he wanted to prioritise the categories for future brand stretch and innovation opportunities. What does their brand stand for today, how credible is the brand in these new spaces and what value would it bring? Combining qualitative and quantitative research as well as sales data we narrowed down the opportunities. On top of that, we defined key brand drivers that the client could leverage to build its equity in these new categories.

Growing market shares by understanding needs: Our client had built a strong and solid technical reputation in producing sportswear. They were the first brand in running shoes in a very competitive sports market. They had the ambition to double their share. Through a series of studies (including in-depth interviews, social listening and structured interviews) we unraveled the key needs in sports and how brands at that time delivered on these needs. We identified several strategic options for our client, which we helped to develop into concrete actions through activation workshops. The result was an impressive growth in shares in the following years.

Case Study - Property Management

Client has the vision to be the world class management and investor of real estate commercial properties across Asia. One of its key initiatives is to adopt and develop strategic consumer-centric property portfolio management guidelines for sustainable growth and expansion.

Qualitative Focus:
- Ipsos put together a dedicated team of specialist consultants and customized a thorough research management consultant program.
- The study combines market visits, ethnographies and accompanied shopping, and consumer groups across three malls of distinct
profiles.
Quantitative Focus:
- To profile the consumer and their shopping behaviors and needs with hard data.
- As management consultants, we worked closely with client's senior management through stakeholder interviews and workshops to gain
buy-in and implement necessary changes and recommendations.

Value to Client:
- We helped client to develop a systematic portfolio management framework with guidelines on designs, communications, events and
leasing. Concurrently, Client engaged in a rebranding exercise and came up with a new vision.
- As a value-added bonus, our insights from the new study not only have confirmed the new vision but have contributed much to the understanding of how the new vision can align with the portfolio management framework.

Consumer & Shopper