Brands Laid Bare Using Market Research for Evidence-Based Brand Management

By drawing on market research to understand consumers, marketers can better understand how to manage their brand. Exploring a spectrum of 12 customer needs and drawing on first--hand research evidence, Kevin Ford provides a proven framework for understanding what people are really looking for from a brand.

Which matters more, the marketing or the customer?

Fifty years ago the emphasis was firmly on the marketing. Campaigns were flung out at vast groups of indistinct consumers with the aim of directly influencing their behaviour.

Half a century later things could not be more different. Marketers now closely examine the needs and passions of individuals as a basis for delivering a brand experience in tune with their lives. This shift has created an urgent need to ‘comprehend the consumer’. And the only way to achieve this is to draw on insights delivered through market research.

Based on a unique ‘spectrum of needs’ for understanding how people interact with brands – what they want from them, how they judge them and ultimately what makes them buy them – Brands Laid Bare uncovers the truth beneath the marketing rhetoric.

The way we relate to brands has changed. Once, brand management was about doing things to people, and choices were made by brand managers not consumers. Now the focus has shifted towards the customer, empowering them to make choices and treating them as individuals rather than an amorphous mass. A consequence of this is increased interest in understanding people as a foundation for brand management. And this is where market research can come in. By drawing on market research to understand consumers, marketers can better understand how to manage their brand. Exploring a spectrum of 12 customer needs and drawing on first--hand research evidence, Kevin Ford provides a proven framework for understanding what people are really looking for from a brand -- and delivering it.