Pictures speak louder than words: Towards a new understanding of brand choice

Brand managers are faced with a wide array of business challenges: How can I better position my brand? How can I optimise my portfolio? Where can I find new growth opportunities?

Traditional quantitative research has relied heavily on stated responses, often using long lists of attributes. While there is still room for this kind of measurement, it does not adequately capture people’s less conscious needs. People’s decision making is often influenced by their intuition; therefore, it is important that we capture less conscious desires as well as the mental shortcuts people use when making brand decisions.

To evolve the traditional survey to capture non-conscious decision-making, we have developed a new metaphor elicitation technique to uncover implicit brand choice influencers. While metaphor elicitation has been used as a qualitative technique for many years, the approach we have developed uses a quantitative method – making metaphor elicitation efficient, scalable, and accessible.

We recommend leveraging metaphor elicitation to capture important implicit drivers of brand choice. Because metaphor elicitation uses a projective technique, it helps respondents avoid over-rationalization and provides more intuitive responses. Moreover, it generates a deeper, more granular understanding of emotional benefits and provides rich data that reflects how consumers (in their own language) really think and feel about products and brands. By getting a truer consumer-centric measure of influence, marketers can better position their brands, optimize their portfolios and uncover innovation opportunities.

To learn more read Pictures Speak Louder than Words.

This paper has been published by the GreeBook.

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