A brief guide to brand insight to improve your brand strategy

Before you start improving your consumer brand strategy or even launch a new campaign, it’s time to dive into your brand insight. Because how are you going to reach your target audiences with the right product if you’re not sure if it’s aligned with the state of your brand?

In this guide, we’ll cover what brand insight is and why it matters. We’ll give you some examples of how our brands put insights into action and give you some inspiration to get started with brand insights yourself!

What is brand insight? 

Brand insights are all about how well you know and understand your brand and how it aligns with your target audiences’ needs. It is an umbrella term that covers metrics like brand awareness, brand perception, brand integrity, brand trust, as well as a brand’s value proposition and mission. 

Brand insights can therefore be used for a variety of things, such as category fore-sighting or for improving customer experience and satisfaction. In the right hands, insight is a hugely powerful tool for brands.

Why is brand insight important?

The more you know, the better — if you collect data that is actually valuable to you. We’ll list some reasons why you should start collecting brand insights right away, and explain how it contributes to the success of your business. 

Brand insights help you determine your brand health

Let’s compare a brand to a person. The better you get to know yourself, the better you can take care of yourself, right? People live longer and happier if they do. 

This is comparable to brand health, and to know how healthy your brand is, you need insight. What are your weak spots and your strong suits? Knowing this sets you up for an elongated lifetime of success as a brand — as it does for humans.

Brand insights help you prepare for the future

Insight is crucial for foresight. If you want to build a future-proof brand and roll out consistently good products, services, campaigns and content, it’s time to get to know your brand, your target consumer segments and consumer brand preferences. 

Only looking back won’t get you all the way, but identifying things in your past brand insights could also be very useful for future reference. 

Brand insights are fuel on the fire for creative processes

Creative processes also benefit from clear brand insights. As nice as it is to think and work outside the box, your brand’s creative brains do need a sense of direction, before they lose sight of the box completely. 

Brand insight used well does not limit creative freedom, but actually makes it easier to connect the dots and helps create content, messaging, or ad campaigns that really match the brand — and wouldn’t match any other, for that matter. 

That makes things a whole lot easier for your team, but you also makes your brand easier to recognize to your customers. Up goes your brand recognition, and hopefully also your brand perception stays, well, on brand. 

Brand insight helps you understand a brand interaction and consumer behavior better

Only analyzing consumer behaviors isn’t enough. If you notice your key audiences have a very specific consumer response to your brand positioning surveys, look both ways before you jump to conclusions. 

You can have massive amounts of data on what consumers are doing, but they’re only one part of the relationship. To put it all in perspective, look inwards too.

Yes, what’s going on in your target audience is important, but you need to be able to link it to what your brand is apparently doing to them. A brand interaction is simply a reaction to something you say or do — hence the need for insights into what kind of brand you really are. 

Brand insight examples 

So, what do brand insights look like in the real world? We highlight some of our customers’ stories, on how they collect and use insights to beat the competition and better cater to consumer needs. 

Evive Nutrition on taking the States by storm

When Evive Nutrition wanted to bring their business to the States, they knew their brand had to be solid and stand out from the competition for all the right reasons. So, Brand Manager Amaël Proulx turned to their subscribers to find out how to bulletproof the Evive brand.

“Our biggest challenge is explaining the flexibility of our model to our members. Lots of subscription businesses are making it hard for their customers to modify their subscription plan, which is not the case with Evive. We want our members to get access to our products when they want and need them. The flexibility of our model makes the forecasting process a bit more difficult, especially for our operation team in charge of inventory management at all of our four facilities.”

They conducted surveys using Attest to validate their assumptions about their communications. 

“One significant learning that we’ve implemented was which value propositions to highlight in this new market. We’re also in the midst of launching a completely revamped website in both territories, so we definitely applied all our learnings to this project.”

Read the entire case study from Evive Nutrition!

Want to get valuable information like that in no time? Get started with our templates for brand tracking surveys.

Helping a brand grow big and strong: How Little Dish uses Attest to drive category growth

Little Dish’s Marketing Manager, Clem Elphinstone, explains how they used Attest to track brand health metrics, to measure the growth of their brand and their sector. 

“We use various digital analysis tools; sprout social, Google Analytics, Hotjar and so on. However, Attest was introduced, so we could begin understanding our market penetration and brand awareness.” 

Little Dish first used Attest as a brand tracking solution to measure brand awareness over time. They focused on the impact that key campaigns made to understand the effectiveness of that activation. 

Data on brand awareness and purchase intent lets Little Dish benchmark these figures against their biggest competitors, and understand their relative growth within the category over time. 

“Because of Attest, Little Dish has a much more in-depth understanding of our campaign effectiveness and can better learn how to best drive brand awareness and growth — easily and with agility.”

Read the full Little Dish case study here!

Oddbox defeating the odds for national expansion (and saving £200K!)

Oddbox gives a perfect example of how using brand insights can save you money and raise brand awareness at the same time. 

When launching their vegetable box brand into three new UK regions, they wanted to gauge existing brand awareness in each region before planning the launch campaigns and buying media. You can only spend each penny once. 

Oddbox used Attest for brand tracking, to measure metrics like prompted and unprompted brand awareness across the country and dig deeper into awareness by region.

By adding questions about brand discovery, they found out how to effectively target consumers in each region. 

In the Midlands, for example, they found people were more open to product recommendations from influencers and also that they were more likely to take up a product if they received a leaflet about it. 

Meanwhile, in the Southwest and Bristol, there was more of a resistance to advertising in general and more skepticism.

This helped them ​​to significantly cut their ad spend and not waste any creative brain power or time on campaigns that wouldn’t be as effective, tailoring their media mix to specific regions. 

Read the full Oddbox case study!

We also wrote a guide to the most important metrics are for measuring brand health for your business. Check out these top brand health metrics.

Brand Insight Applications

If the examples above don’t sound like a reason to start gathering and acting on brand insights, we don’t know what will. To spark your imagination even more, here we’ll list some practical ways to put brand insights into action.

1. Raising brand awareness – How are you gonna get more awareness to your brand if you don’t really know what to highlight, and how, and to the right consumer segments? Oddbox gave the perfect example for how you can use brand insights like brand awareness to tailor your campaigns and messaging and effectively raise brand awareness, while also winning the customers’ trust. 
2. Improving brand positioning – From a marketing standpoint, brand insights are highly valuable. You can use them to design ad campaigns that are in line with not just your branding, but also what your brand stands for. This kind of on-brand messaging reinforces the power of your brand, and consumers will surely notice.
3. Setting up a new strategy – Strategies need data. Take a look at your past brand and insights before you start redesigning your strategy. Brand metrics are powerful insights — because how can you improve if you don’t know what areas need a little push? Start by gathering data on your current status and use the outcomes to set clear goals, and communicate them to your team. 

Attest — your one-stop-shop for all things brand insight

We have templates for brand tracking surveys ready to use and send to our audience of 125 million people in 58 countries. There’s an intro brand tracking survey, but you can also take things a step further with the extended brand tracker or our FREE brand awareness survey. Need a little more help on deciding what brand metrics to measure first?