Brand / Customer Satisfaction Profile

Question: How do I know how important branding is for my business?

Answer:

If by "branding" you are referring to the image aspects of what you do, rather than the straight nuts and bolts as the customer sees them, this will vary from market to market. Typically, the more commodity the market, the more need there is to differentiate your business with softer image-based components. And nowadays, nearly all markets are intrinsically commodity markets – it is the level of effort of the leading players in brand building which determines whether the business propositions are added-value or not.

Key points

The Brand/Satisfaction Profile tool is designed to help you run internal workshops to explore:
1. How much of the persuasiveness of your brand is based on hard vs. soft issues
2. Your brand and customer satisfaction profile vs. competitors
3. Your Quality vs. Price ratio


Across many workshops we have discovered a consistent group of people who can be described as "brand sceptics" - they feel that the only real issues customers consider are "hard" issues - those we label "Customer Satisfaction" issues.

However, the "softer" Brand Satisfaction" issues will at least play some role in the customer purchase decision, and sometimes a dominant one, especially in mature commodity markets.

This tool helps the group determine and discuss the relative importance of these two classes of issues, and how your brand stacks up against each type.