Brand Research Topics

These are some of the areas of customer, brand and marketing research that I think could better inform brand management and marketing activities and decisions:

• Understand how well this generic four part segmentation scheme applies to a wide variety of product and service categories: (a) price conscious customers, (b) convenience oriented customers, (c) brand loyal customers, and (d) category enthusiasts who love to try new products and brands. Determine to what types of products and services this segmentation scheme mostly applies. 
• Identify the top few visual triggers for each of the top 100 brands. Include auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory triggers as applicable. 
• Determine the primary and secondary personas for people who prefer each automotive brand, make and model. 
• Understand what categories and brands are most effective in signaling social status within each social class. Categories to explore might include college/university affiliation, private club affiliation, religious affiliation, political party affiliation, city or town of residence, housing preferences, vacation preferences, hotel preferences, automobile preferences, hobbies, sports, musical preferences, food preferences, etc. Explore which brands across all categories are the most accurate and powerful indicators of social status. 
• Related to the previous bullet, identify the top 100 brands that serve as self-expressive badges. 
• Segment the US population by anxieties and fears. 
• Develop complete psychological profiles of each Democratic and Republican segment including attitudes, beliefs, values, hopes, anxieties and fears. Better yet, explore these segments independent of political party to identify organic groupings of voters.
• Identify price sensitivities across product and service categories for different customer segments.
• Determine the degree to which trustworthiness, consistency, reliability and dependability contribute to brand loyalty. 
• Determine the degree to which emotional versus rational appeals influence purchase decisions in different product and service categories. 
• Develop a brand loyalty scheme that considers whether and under what conditions (including scarcity and extreme price variance) people will substitute or switch to another brand versus waiting until they can purchase their fist choice brand.
• For different categories, determine what going upmarket or downmarket does to brand perceptions and loyalty for current customers. 
• Understand the categories in which aspirational brands can have the biggest impact.
• Understand what elements must be present for people to believe a brand's claim of social consciousness. 
• Understand the impact of brand message repetition on believability, quality perceptions, preference and sales. 
• Understand the effectiveness of reach versus frequency in generating incremental sales by product or service category. The incremental sales could come from current customers, new customers or both. 
• Explore the effectiveness of different types of humor used in different ways in brand advertising. 
• Identify the top 10 value-aligned brands in the world. Explore what values they embody and to what groups of people those values most appeal.