Leveraging Qualitative Research to Investigate and Build Brand Trust
Get an advantage with projective techniques, marketing sciences, and agile tracking approaches.
As we talked about in a previous post, brand is one of three strategic pillars we have solutions to investigate.
In this post, let’s consider a qualitative assessment of your brand.
First, we need context. When discussing a brand assessment, it's crucial to know where we are in the timeline of brand initiatives. We need to know, are we conducting an initial brand assessment or continuing from a previous one? Here, let's assume this is our second assessment and the cadence of study is annually, conducted in Q3, with data collection concluding in August (as you might guess, brand studies will need to field at the same time of the year for each year of deployment).
In the second year, we'll assume that a customized qualitative module was included in the brand study. If you're acquainted with our strategic investigation framework, we're employing the qualitative study to explore several "why" questions.
Specifically, during our research configuration session, we heard that the business was very concerned about brand trust which is not directly measured in the brand study. A number of business leaders became aware of a thought leadership study that suggested there are seven levels of trust as well as learning that:
A rapidly evolving landscape means trust is increasing in importance as a cornerstone for business success,
Trust is a driver of loyalty, growth, and risk mitigation,
Trust is imperative to strategically build and maintain with all audiences (customers, employees, and partners),
The degree of consumer trust may be shifting away from traditional institutions to entities that they deem deserve their trust, and
How technology is deployed can increase or decrease brand transparency so is a key part of the strategy to build trust.
The learnings imply businesses have a unique opportunity to capitalize on an emerging consumer shift. And part of capitalizing on an opportunity, includes developing proprietary insights to build a differentiated strategy.
A qualitative marketing research study was designed to answer: how does our organization develop a consumer centric definition of trust to build from and message on? Other research objectives included understanding from a consumer centric perspective:
…what are trust building actions?
…how should we communicate our brand trust strategy?
…what do each of the seven levers mean to consumers?
…what experiences highlight our brand’s ability to be trustworthy?
The insights from the qualitative project would be used to 1) develop strategic next steps and 2) inform the design of future modules to add to the existing brand health study.
The insights from the qualitative study were anchored in projective techniques. If you’re not familiar with qualitative projective techniques, these are methods to uncover unconscious, less-than-rational motives and perceptions that traditional quantitative methods may overlook. These techniques can illuminate participants' less conscious, less rational, and less socially acceptable feelings through indirect exercises, moving the discussion away from direct questions and allowing participants to project their true feelings. A key goal of the qualitative study was to employ these techniques to deep dive into consumer experiences and yield meaningful insights.
This study strategy exemplifies how employing a mixed methodology can elevate your brand-building efforts. The setup leverages the substantial advantages of qualitative research to explore brands, thereby improving your organization's capacity to operate in a complex environment with an actionable and clearly defined business strategy.
In a follow-up post we’ll cover several marketing science models that can extend the value of the study design and are valuable to pinpoint what actions to take to improve brand performance.
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