As soon as the clip landed, everyone had something to say.

General online opinion appears to be negative, with many wondering why a brand with such an embedded position in the market would need to relaunch at all, and why they’d want to do it without appearing to maintain any of their prestigious heritage.

But what a few tweeters and marketing mouthpieces think doesn’t really matter. What really matters is what consumers think.

That’s what we’ve tried to find out.

We ran a survey to 1,000 nationally representative consumers in the UK and the US to get some answers. And here’s what we found…

Quick summary

• 42.7% of consumers reacted negatively to Jaguar’s rebrand ad, while 30.9% had a more positive response.
• Positive reactions highlighted the ad’s creativity, inclusiveness, and appeal to younger audiences.
• Negative feedback included confusion, lack of car representation, and dislike of the ad’s “woke” messaging.
• The ad resonated more with potential electric vehicle buyers, who were more likely to consider Jaguar.
• Consumers were impressed by the ad’s modern approach and its challenge to Jaguar’s traditional image.

What’s the overall sentiment?

Overall sentiment towards the ad is mixed, with 42.7% giving a negative reaction.

When we asked whether the ad had any effect on people’s opinion of Jaguar, the response was almost split down the middle. 30.9% said they felt more positive about the brand after seeing the ad, and 29.7% said they felt more negative.

How the ad impacts people’s opinion of Jaguar

We then asked each group what specifically made them feel more positive or negative about Jaguar after seeing the ad.

Using Attest’s Gen AI summary of open-text responses, we found:

• The advertisement was perceived as innovative, creative, and different from typical car ads, standing out with its unique approach.
• Viewers appreciated the vibrant colors, diverse representation, and modern, fashion-forward styling of the ad.
• The ad conveyed a sense that Jaguar is evolving to be more inclusive, modern, and forward-thinking, challenging its traditional image.
• Many respondents felt the ad made Jaguar seem more exciting, relatable, and appealing to a younger audience.
• The “Copy Nothing” slogan and emphasis on uniqueness resonated with viewers, reinforcing Jaguar’s premium and distinctive brand image.

And here’s the negative group’s summary:

• Lack of car representation: Many respondents were frustrated that the ad didn’t show or mention Jaguar vehicles.
• Confusion and irrelevance: Viewers found the ad confusing, weird, and unrelated to Jaguar’s brand or products.
• Dislike of perceived “woke” messaging: Some respondents criticized the ad for being too politically correct or pushing a progressive agenda.
• Stylistic complaints: The avant-garde fashion, music, and visuals were off-putting to many viewers who expected a more traditional luxury car advertisement.
• Failure to communicate about the product: Respondents felt the ad provided no information about Jaguar’s cars or brand values.

Will the ad make people want to buy a Jaguar?

When the media and social media heat has died down, what’ll really matter to Jaguar is whether they’ve won over any potential customers with their new positioning.

We segmented the results to specifically find out whether people who are thinking of buying an electric car in the next 12 months would be more or less likely to choose a Jaguar following this campaign.

The results are encouraging for the car brand…

A statistically significant number of EV buyers said the ad made them feel ‘much more positive’ and Jaguar after seeing the ad.

And that enthusiasm does seem to translate into an increased likelihood to consider a Jaguar as their next EV.

This result would imply that EV buyers – presumably the target audience for this new electric phase of Jaguar’s offering – are impressed with what they’ve seen so far.

And this is before we get into the free earned media Jaguar has generated with this launch…

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Every so often you’ll see an ad, and wonder how it came to be. Like when McDonald’s replaced images of burgers and fries with smiling people.

The secret to ads like these that stand out and still convey a strong message? Ad testing.

Here you’ll learn how to make your next advertising campaign your best one yet using a creative testing survey. Ready to boost your ad success?

What is ad testing and why is it important?

Running an ad test is a great way to test the waters, especially if you’re launching something new—that might be fresh branding, a new product or unique messaging that really needs to stand out.

Creative testing is a surefire way of evaluating the effectiveness of ad concepts before they are released to the public.

You can test different aspects of an ad. You can zoom in on the copy to find the snappiest words, test media placement, images and colors to see what stands out or reflects your brand best, or simply test to see if it moves your target audience the way you want it to.

Conducting an ad testing survey with creative testing is a great way for marketers and creatives to work together to create advertisements that have the best ROI.

It helps teams back up their creative ideas with data, to launch campaigns with confidence—and reach goals faster than ever.

It’s also a great way to prevent costly mistakes or ads that miss the mark from going live, which means you’re optimizing your ad spend.

There are plenty of ways to turn test ads. Here are some of the most common ones:

• Surveys: Creative testing surveys are a great way to get qualitative and quantitative data on specific elements of your ads, a complete ad or to test multiple ads. You can use them in any stage of the development process, segment your respondents to see how different groups respond and even compare your ads to your competitors’ ads. (yes—there’s no law against running creative testing of your competitors’ assets to make sure you know how your target audience reacts). It’s definitely the most versatile way to run ad tests.
• A/B testing: This or that? A/B testing is a classic way to test ads using market research. It’s where you test one idea, then another, and compare the results. Typically A/B testing is done when an asset is live, and the variations are displayed to equally sized audiences. But you can also do A/B testing before going live to make sure you choose the best option.
• Focus groups: Gather ’round kids, it’s time to talk about ads. A group of people that fit your target group are gathered to provide feedback on an ad campaign, which can help identify potential issues and provide insights on how to improve the campaign. Compared to A/B testing, this provides more in-depth feedback, but it’s hard to scale, it’s time-consuming and it’s expensive. They’re great for getting flashes of inspiration from the verbatim responses to your questions, but they should always be accompanied by more statistically robust surveys to validate the qualitative insights.
• Eye-tracking studies: like a cat following a laser, consumers will immediately look at specific ad elements. This is a more scientific approach to measuring an ad’s effectiveness, looking at where people focus their attention on an ad to identify which elements are most effective in capturing attention. It is however hard to scale because you’ll likely need research participants to be on-site.

There’s a method for every marketer out there, depending on what key metrics you choose to focus on. However, collecting data from customers on a large scale, both qualitative and quantitative and segmented into different target groups, is best done using surveys.

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How to conduct effective ad testing

Time to get to work. Here’s what the process of ad testing could look like.

1. Ideation

Time to come up with the ads to test! Start by brainstorming ad ideas and creatives that align with your marketing goals and target audience. Think about what you want to test as well.

2. Analyze data from previous ad campaigns

Meanwhile, analyzing data from previous ad campaigns can provide insights into what worked and what didn’t, helping to optimize your future ad campaigns. This will also help you formulate better questions and find what to focus on in individual ad analysis.

3. Run ad testing surveys

Now you’ve got your ads (or a single ad), it’s time to put them in a survey to find out what your target audience thinks of them. With a tool like Attest you can show respondents visuals and then ask them different types of questions.

• What was your initial reaction to the ad?
• What message do you think the ad was trying to convey?
• How interested in the product/service are you after seeing this ad?
• How likely are you to purchase the product/service after seeing the ad?
• How credible do you find the claims made in the ad?
• Was the length of the ad appropriate? Too short, too long, or just right?
• What did you like/ dislike about the ad?

4. Test your initial findings with a focus group

Additionally or alternatively, you can use a focus group to dive deeper into your survey results if needed. This can be particularly beneficial if your survey is inconclusive, or if you want to gather more knowledge on responses.

5. Optional: A/B testing

If you want to keep the research going, you can create different versions of an ad and run them alongside each other, to find out which one is the perfect ad. If the survey results were clear, however, you can just go ahead and launch the ad or campaign that came out as the winner.

6. Keep an eye on social media and other metrics

Social media platforms often have built-in metrics that can help track ad performance, such as reach, engagement, and conversion rates. Also track what people are saying about your ad or brand in general, for example for instance using social listening tools.

Benefits and challenges of creative ad testing

Creating effective ads is challenging. Ad testing is there to make it easier, but it needs to be executed the right way. To do so, here are some of the advantages of ad testing methods, but also some challenges—and how to deal with them.

Pros of ad testing

• Less guesswork: Provides data and insights into what messaging and visuals resonate with the target audience.
• Minimize risk: Helps identify potential issues with the ad campaign before launch. From ads that are simply not funny, unintended controversial copy or plain boring designs: catch it before it goes viral.
• Increase sales: An ad that’s spot on can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. Ad testing helps you create ads that drive sales.
• Better for your ad budget: Ad testing allows for optimization of ad campaigns, resulting in better ROI.

Cons of ad testing (and how to solve them)

• Cost: Ad testing can be expensive, particularly methods such as focus groups or eye-tracking studies.
• Time-consuming: Some forms of ad testing can take time, particularly if you are running A/B tests or analyzing data from previous campaigns. And gathering groups of people usually doesn’t happen overnight either.
• Limited sample size: Certain methods of ad testing limit your ability to get a representative sample of the target audience, which means your results might also be blurred. This particularly applies to focus groups.
• Creativity limitations: Ad testing can sometimes stifle creativity and lead to analysis paralysis, by focusing too heavily on data and metrics. Especially if you’re not collecting the right data—creatives need both quantitative and qualitative data to go on.

How surveys can help with ad testing challenges:

With surveys, you can tackle these challenges:

• Surveys can be sent to a larger group of people, providing a more representative sample of your target audience.
• Surveys can be a cost-effective method of gathering feedback from a large number of people, especially if your tool also makes analysis simple.
• Surveys can be created, sent out and analyzed quickly and easily, saving time compared to other methods.
• Surveys can still allow for creativity, particularly if using open-ended questions.

Best practices for creating compelling ad creative

When crafting your next ad concepts, keep these best practices in mind.

Focus on your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Your ad creative should clearly communicate what sets your product or service apart. If you’re struggling to find a place to start, really zoom in on that in your creative testing surveys.

Consider the customer journey

Think about where and when your target audience will see your ad. How far along are they in the customer journey at that point? What is their purchase intent at that point? What information do they need to proceed?

Keep it simple

Ad creative should be easy to understand and digest, with a clear message that is easy to comprehend. If your survey focuses on whether your ad is too difficult to understand, it probably is. Take a page from Coca-Cola’s book, who hit the nail on the head with this ultra-simple campaign.

Be consistent across channels

If you’re running ads on multiple platforms, make sure your messaging and visuals are consistent. This will help build brand recognition and create a cohesive experience for your customers.

Be authentic

Be real. No stock images. No over-used quotes or clichés. Don’t hide behind outdated messages or try to play it too safe. Authenticity builds trust, and it’s memorable.

Use humor or emotion

An industry that isn’t known for its humor in their ads? Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions. Occasionally they do try to play into some emotion, but it will completely miss the mark with a large chunk of their audience.

That’s precisely what Yonder used in their new campaign, that is full of hilarious responses to traditional credit card companies. Humor’s a hit, always.

Choose the right ad testing platform for you

Ready to create ad campaigns that truly resonate with your target audience? We can help you create your best ad yet. If you’re looking for a creative ad testing platform that provides you with designated research advice, look no further.

Our creative testing tools and survey templates are here to help you create a winning ad. Access to 150+ million people 59 countries means you’ll be able to get the right consumers to provide feedback on your advertisement ideas, within hours.

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You can never fully guess how your audience will react to your copy—and you shouldn’t. What you should do is test your copy with your target market. You can test ads and copy variations, and see how different versions perform for different audience segments.

With copy testing, you remove the guesswork and measure the effectiveness of your carefully chosen words and learn how you can adjust your copy to maximize its impact—whether that’s increasing conversions or raising brand awareness.

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into copy testing. It’s a must-do for every business that wants its copy to have an effect, and who doesn’t? Let’s start with the basics of what copy testing is and work our way down to a step-by-step guide for you to start testing ads and other pieces of copy.

Some questions to ask when copy testing are:

• Based on what you just read, how much do you like or dislike the following taglines?
• Knowing that these are taglines for a [X category business], how relevant or irrelevant does each tagline feel?
• How likely or unlikely would you be to find out more about what [X brand] does after reading this tagline?

What is copy testing?

Copy testing is the art and science of evaluating the effectiveness of advertising copy. It involves assessing how well an advertisement or piece of copy communicates a message, engages the target audience, and achieves its intended objectives.

Those objectives can be anything from getting people to click on a social ad, to helping them remember your brand when they’re looking to purchase in the future.

Here’s a list of goals that copy testing can help you achieve:

• Increased conversion rate on landing pages—finding the perfect CTA that your target audience can’t help but follow up on.
• Increasing click-through rates on ads (and ultimately boost actual sales) for PPC ads, social media ads and other forms of measurable promotions.
• To make your ad memorable—with copy testing, you can grow brand awareness among your target audience by creating unforgettable copy that matches your brand.
• Evaluating brand fit—feel like experimenting? Copy testing can help you make sure you don’t stray too far from your brand identity.
• Identifying strengths and weaknesses—learning what resonates with your audience can help your copywriters hit the nail on the head faster over time.

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5 Ad copy testing methods to validate your messaging

Copy resting isn’t sending over a Google Doc link to people and asking them to leave comments (or even worse, suggestions!).

Here are some structured approaches to use for your copy test.

1. Conduct copy testing using surveys

Surveys are an ideal way to do copy testing, because you can gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Online surveys allow you to reach very specific audiences, and ask them very specific questions, but at a large scale. With Attest, you get access to 150+ million people in 59 countries—plenty to get some super valuable insight into how your copy performs. And our platform is perfect for creative testing, allowing you to show respondents all your ideas, and for you to interrogate the results in a clear and user-friendly way.

If you want to have clear results on what creative ideas have the most impact, try our creative testing survey templates to see how easy and powerful it is.

Copy testing survey questions

Wrote so much copy you’re lost for words on survey questions? Try these questions for your copy tests (we’re using taglines for this example, but you could switch that for whatever copy asset you’re testing):

1. Based on what you just read, how much do you like or dislike the following taglines?
2. Knowing that these are taglines for a [X category business], how relevant or irrelevant does each tagline feel?
3. Please rank the following taglines from most to least favorite.
4. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘This tagline gives me a clear understanding of what [X brand] does’?
5. How likely or unlikely would you be to find out more about what [X brand] does after reading this tagline?
6. What words would you use to describe how this tagline makes you feel? Please be as descriptive as possible.

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2. Ad copy testing in focus groups

Gather some critical thinkers and lay your copy ideas out in front of them. Focus groups can be a great way to test the emotional impact of your copy ideas, and to get really in-depth, nuanced, qualitative data.

3. Use eye tracking in ad copy testing

You might think: what’s the point, we’re just reading from left to right, right?

Wrong! Tracking eye movements is a great way to determine what copy attracts attention first and how people read your assets. This is an interesting tool to use when you’re creating visual ads. However, it’s pricier and can’t be done at a large scale without taking a lot of time, so it’s really only for special projects or to supplement wider quantitative or qualitative market research.

4. Copy testing using biometric testing

We all know the feeling of our heart rate increasing when reading a specific text, or how we get sweaty hands when seeing a subject line that means you’ll be working late today.

People physically react to what they see and read, and with biometric testing you can find out what your copy is doing to people. But, like eye tracking, this is hard to do at a larger scale. Data about heart rates and sweat drops might also not give your copywriters the insights they need to make specific improvements.

5. Copy testing with usability research tools

You can use specific usability research tools to test whether your copy is charming or off-putting. They’re often more design focused, but that goes hand in hand with copy, so if you create good examples, you can use these tools for your copy testing needs too.

How to test your ad copy

Can’t wait to run your great ideas by your audience? Here’s how to take it step by step for optimal success.

1. Define your copy’s purpose

If you want to know whether your ad copy is effective, you need to determine what the desired effect is. Is it click-through rates? Is it increased brand awareness? Is it making people cry? This will help you create laser-focused survey questions to get the most out of your copy testing survey.

2. Determine the target audience

Who are you writing for? That’s the first step of finding out what you will actually write. It can help you focus and point you in some direction. Identifying your target audience is crucial to ensure that the ad copy is relevant and appealing to them. Later on, when running the survey, you can do a quick test up front with some demographic questions, to cut the data and get hyper relevant results.

3. Create different versions of copy

The next step is to create the ad copy. Even if you have a general idea of what you want to write, try playing around with some nuances. Surveys can help you test different variations of your ad copy to determine which version is most effective in achieving its purpose.

4. Write a creative testing survey

Here’s where the fun begins. You can sit down to determine survey questions and zoom in on specific parts of your copy. If you need help, our creative testing survey template will lead the way—or our Customer Research Team is here to help you launch really great creative testing.

5. Test your ad copy

Time to run those tests! When you’re using the right tools, this means you can finally sit back and relax and recover from your writer’s block.

6. Adjust your ads accordingly

‘Write without fear, edit without mercy’, said someone once.

Great advice. And we’d add: never edit without feedback.

Once the results are in, you can fine-tune your copy. Don’t view the feedback you’ve received as criticism. Instead, see it as an opportunity to co-create effective copy with your target market.

It makes copywriting easier and eliminates the risk of ineffective campaigns later down the line.

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But wait, why is copy testing important?

Ultimately, both A/B testing and copy testing will help you create more effective ads and copy over time. However, with copy testing, you don’t waste money on running ads or publishing landing pages that aren’t performing well.

It can be more time consuming to create copy this way, but that will pay itself back in higher conversion rates from the get-go.

Here are more reasons you should start copy testing, preferably today.

Get a better ROI

By improving the effectiveness of your ad copy, you can achieve better results with the same or even lower advertising spend. While you fine-tune your targeting and even expand your ads to more channels, test to determine whether the copy you’re using is working. It’ll pay off, trust us.

Get A competitive advantage

By identifying what messaging works best with your target audience, you can become more effective in your marketing, and ultimately more successful. Just look at the success of brands like Thursday or Innocent Smoothies: Thursday has the same singles as other apps, and Innocent has the same fruits as other smoothies, but they still stand out. This way of testing and creating copy can help you launch ads that have an emotional impact on those who see them, helping you stay top of mind.

Create a data-driven decision-making process

Creative work doesn’t equal guesswork. Copy testing provides data-driven insights into the effectiveness of any type of copy. This will enable your team of creatives and marketers to make informed decisions about their next campaigns, based on more than just ‘style’.

Reduce the risk of failure

We all know a cringy example of companies that launched a campaign without testing the copy first. Whether it’s translations gone painfully wrong, or businesses trying to use the language of Gen Z completely wrong—it can all be prevented with a round of copy testing. But it goes beyond preventing reputational damage. You also reduce the risk of launching ineffective copy and ads into this world, making it the smart, cost-effective thing to do.

Copy testing vs A/B testing: what’s the difference?

You might think: but we’re already doing A/B testing, isn’t that the same thing? The short answer is no, it’s not.

Copy tests happen before a landing page or any type of marketing copy goes live. It’s a form of pre testing and getting consumer feedback on something that isn’t yet published. You’ll work with a consumer panel before it goes live, which will give you valuable insight into your creative campaign.

You can ask your target market questions like: does this ad impact your impression of brand X, or does this landing page make you want to buy product Z. And of course, you’ll gather quantitative data on the why behind their answers—don’t feed your copywriters only numbers (it scares them).

A/B testing, and split testing, in a way, happens when ad campaigns are already live. It’s ad testing on the go, and seeing the difference in results for different versions as the campaign runs. Your marketing team might test two landing pages to see which one converts better. Once the results are clear, you can opt for putting all your efforts on the best-performing version. You’re making crystal clear decisions based on what the quantitative data is telling you: from click rates to hard-earned cash.

But A/B testing rarely gathers qualitative data, which makes improving your copy over time challenging. Your copywriters will often have to make assumptions on why one ad performed better than the other, and launching a survey afterward might not provide feedback that is clear and relevant.

Use copy testing best practices to improve your brand messaging

No, we’re not going to let you go without some final words of advice—and encouragement!

1. Make sure your survey questions are unbiased and clear. Save the creative writing for your actual ads.
2. Clearly define the objectives and goals of your copy testing project. Be ready and willing to make (drastic) changes to your copy if that’s what consumers tell you they want.
3. Zoom in and be specific. Make sure your survey questions cover all aspects of ad copy, including messaging, visuals, and calls to action.
4. Use a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. Creatives need both.
5. Do it more than once. Analyze the data over time to identify patterns, trends, and key insights about changing consumer preferences. This will help you remain relevant.
   That’s all folks. Time to start testing. If you want to hit the ground running, you can start customizing our creative testing template.

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The post 5 Ad copy testing methods to increase engagement (and why they work) appeared first on Attest.

Having been through the rebranding process and come out the other side, we thought it would be good to share our rebranding experience with you.

Read on to find out why and when a company should consider rebranding, how to approach the process, and how to use consumer insight to make sure your rebranding strategy is successful…

When should you rebrand?

Can you think of a company that’s made changes to its branding for apparently no good reason? Or maybe one that’s hung on to an outdated brand image for far too long?

Companies often fall into the trap of thinking they should ‘refresh’ their image just because they’ve been using it for a number of years. Or, at the other end of the scale, they become afraid of making changes because their performance-driven brand is longstanding.

Knowing when your business needs to rebrand can certainly be difficult. According to a consumer survey we ran, there are three main reasons companies should think about rebranding:

1. The brand is old-fashioned, boring or confusing

If your branding fails to get people excited it’s a good sign it’s not working hard enough for your firm. Whatever the nature of your business, you should aim for a distinctive look that communicates your brand personality. Great branding isn’t just for trendy startups; even ‘serious’ products or services can benefit from a dynamic and inspired brand identity (just look at the likes of Acorns, Oscar Health and Turbotax).

It’s a fact that your branding can completely change the way people perceive your company. It should also help them to understand your product offerings. One company that’s suffered from confusing branding is Coca Cola. When they tried to bring all their Coke subbrands together in ‘One Brand’ packaging, it became all too easy for customers to pick the wrong variant from the fridge. Coke have recently had to amend their rebranding strategy to make navigation more intuitive.

Speaking to customers is the best way to find out what your branding says about your business. And if it gives the impression that your company is out-of-date, complex or dull and dreary, then it’s time for rebranding.

2. The company has changed direction

Sometimes, the branding your company started out with simply no longer fits later down the line. That’s because companies, grow, change and develop – they add new products and services and venture into new markets and industries (it’s why Dunkin Donuts changed their name to Dunkin – these days, they do much more than just donuts).

Another reason for rebranding could be because the world itself has changed, with old technology superseded by newer tech. This is what happened to Radio Shack and why they rebranded to Shack, to get the old-fashioned term ‘radio’ out of their name (although this superficial rebranding wasn’t enough to save the business, which later filed for bankruptcy).

A change of direction can also come from inside the business. Maybe your company has undergone a shift in philosophy or wants to reposition itself in the marketplace? Whatever the reason, if your brand name no longer reflects what you offer, this makes the case for rebranding.

3. You’ve got an image problem

There’s no denying it, some brands are crying out for a rebrand. Sometimes they’re suffering from an identity crisis; putting out mixed messages, confused about what they are and who they’re for.

Other times, firms have fallen from their pedestal, perhaps having suffered a scandal, which they now need to distance themselves from (Facebook was accused of doing exactly this after launching a new logo following a year of controversy surrounding the platform’s data collection and privacy policies).

Or perhaps the need for rebranding is just down to changing ideas of what’s acceptable. We’ve seen a huge shift in recent times, and if anything about your brand could be deemed racist, sexist, ageist, unethical or otherwise offensive, it’s definitely worth considering a rebrand (heritage brands like Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Jemima are already doing it).

Of course, it’s not just about how your company appears on the outside – it’s important to tackle any issues at a deeper, institutional level or else your rebrand is likely to fall flat on its face.

When shouldn’t you rebrand?

Rebranding is a significant corporate investment and not something to be entered into lightly. It’s also not something you should do in a hurry. It’s vital to do all the prep work behind the rebrand before sitting down with designers to work on the new brand logo and colors.

This means really understanding what you’re trying to achieve through rebranding; what you want to change, the image you’re trying to create and how this feeds into your wider business plans and practices. For example, if you want to reposition your brand as environmentally friendly and sustainable, what concrete initiatives are you building this brand identity around?

Branding needs to be more than skin deep so don’t do it when you’re not ready. Here are three other bad reasons to rebrand:

1.Because competitors have recently rebranded

Keep an eye on your competition, by all means, but just because a competitor rebrands it doesn’t mean you should. Rebranding isn’t about keeping up with the Joneses, there should be solid reasons behind the move.

You probably won’t be privy to the motivations behind your competitor’s rebrand – perhaps they have a new brand strategy or have received insight that their existing branding isn’t connecting with target consumers?

But whatever it is that’s motivated their rebrand, it won’t necessarily apply to your brand. Don’t respond with a knee-jerk rebranding or you could end up wasting time and money, not to mention losing valuable brand equity.

2. Because you’re a new CMO and you want to make your mark

It’s natural to want to put your stamp on things when coming into a new business but it’s a huge risk to start making changes by rebranding before you’ve properly got under the skin of a brand. You might think being an outsider puts you in the perfect position to see what’s ‘wrong’ but it also leaves you unable to understand the company on a deeper level.

Successfully shaping a brand for the future requires a proper appreciation for its past – where has it come from? How has it evolved? Where does it need to go? Making rash changes risks alienating both customers and staff, which is why a rebrand should be carried out with a consultative approach, and not dominated by any one individual.

3. You think it’s a good time to ‘freshen up’

If you feel like your branding is a bit stale, it’s not necessarily a bad time to think about a rebrand, but companies mustn’t make the decision to rebrand off a hunch alone.

It’s very important to know what consumers think about your branding before you tinker with it – not just because might upset loyal customers, but because it could end up being a complete waste of time and money. Royal Mail learned this lesson the hard way when they spent £1.5m rebranding as Consignia and £1m to go back to their old name.

And if rebranding is not going to have a positive impact on your bottom line, what’s the point? Unless there’s an actual reason behind your rebrand, it’s unlikely to be worthwhile.

Types of rebranding

Partial rebrand

Rebranding doesn’t always mean a complete overhaul of everything your company stands for; sometimes you just need to update to reflect changes to your business.

A partial rebrand (or ‘brand refresh’) might only involve changing specific brand elements, for example making a name change, updating your logo, changing your color scheme or improving your website.

An example of partial rebranding is when car rental firm Hertz updated their logo – it’s still clearly recognisable (you might not even notice the difference) but it’s much more modern in its appearance.

Merger rebrand

When two companies join together, you need to find a way to present the new offering to the world. Perhaps the two brands fit seamlessly together and you can combine the logos into one design (like Uber and Postmates), or maybe the acquisition will require a full rebrand with a name change.

An example of this type of rebranding is when Sandoz merged with Ciba Geigy; the company was renamed Novartis to stake out its place as a life brand rather than a pharmaceutical and chemical company. 

Full rebrand

A full rebrand means a total re-think of your marketing strategy. To begin, you’ll spend time laying out what your company represents; your brand proposition, mission and values and who your target customer is. Once you’re clear on those, you’ll devise a new brand identity that translates what you stand for into verbal and visual branding.

A full rebrand can help change the way people perceive your brand. A good example of this is Old Spice, which was regarded as a brand for older men until a massive rebranding in 2010, which repositioned it for younger people (although the company name was retained).

How to carry out a rebrand in 10 steps

We started considering a rebrand in 2020, after securing $15 million in new investment, expanding in the US and taking our headcount to more than 100 employees. So much had changed since our launch in 2015 and we suspected our branding might need updating to reflect that change.

Here are the 10 steps we followed, from kicking off the rebranding process through to actually implementing our new look. Although there aren’t that many steps, rebranding is by no means a short process. We were working on our rebranding for around a year, taking the time to do lots of research so we were totally clear on what we were trying to achieve and why.

As we know, those who act in haste can repent at leisure, so don’t rush or skip any of the steps!

Step one – carry out a brand identity assessment

Before you decide to rebrand you’ll need to carry out a proper assessment of your brand and existing brand equity. It’s vital to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your branding to maximise your chances of success and to minimise the chances of negatively impacting your firm’s market share.

It’s best to get a wide range of views; speak to your company’s employees, stakeholders and customers, as well as those you would like to be your customers but maybe aren’t at the moment. How do they perceive your brand and do they think your company would benefit from rebranding? There are various ways to ask them including one-to-one interviews, focus groups and consumer surveys (get started with a brand perception survey).

Questions to ask include:

• How would you describe our brand to a friend?
• Who do you think is our target audience?
• On a scale of 1-10 how much do you like our branding?
• What words would you use to describe our branding?
• What words would you use to describe our tone of voice?
• How does our branding make you feel?
• Does our branding reflect the experience you have with our brand?
• How would you improve our branding?

The insight you get from this research will highlight where there are issues and help you to devise effective rebranding strategies.

When we sought feedback from our customers, we found that our branding was letting us down. People thought it was too corporate, functional and blue. They suggested we needed to ‘humanise’; add people, emotion and color. They told us we should be bolder because our company is helping brands to do incredible things. We realised there was a disconnect between how we appeared and who we are as a company and therefore, it would benefit our business to rebrand.

Step two – define what your business stands for

Now you know what your customers actually think about your brand identity, it’s time to set out what you wish they would think. This requires a lot of self-reflection and discussion internally with your team. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s our value proposition?
• What makes us different to competitors?
• What’s our mission?
• What are our core values or beliefs?
• Who are our target audiences and customers?
• How do we help with their key pain points?
• What’s our personality?
• What’s our brand story/where do we come from?
• Where are we headed?

If you’re not clear on who your customers are and what problems you help them solve, it makes sense to carry out different types of consumer profiling. This exercise is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about your customers and move towards more customer-centric messaging (ultimately strengthening your connection with them).

When we did this, we discovered that Attest customers are most likely to be marketeers at high growth companies, working across multiple channels and tactical executions. A key motivation for using us is understanding the ‘why’ (i.e. why do consumers behave like that? Why does this category act like this? Was our campaign impactful?).

With this insight, they don’t have to make decisions on gut feeling alone and can have more confidence in their marketing strategy. But getting the data they need isn’t always easy – it can be slow, expensive, poor quality or it can be hard to work with if you don’t come from a market research background.

Knowing this about our customers gave us a better understanding of what they want from us and the messaging we should be communicating in our branding. Ultimately, we decided that, through rebranding, we wanted to come across as a fresh, innovative tech brand that is also a trusted, well-established market leader.

To differentiate ourselves, we wanted to go to market as the research solution for non-specialists who wants an always-on connection to their customers, in a simple and fast manner. And we wanted a brand identity that challenged the norm that all research needs to be done by trained experts.

Step 3 – write a brief

Whether you’re working with an external branding agency or doing it in-house, you should still write a brief setting out what you want to achieve through your rebranding and what work this will encompass. This should include:

• an overview of the current issues with the branding
• your newly defined brand positioning
• a customer profile
• rebranding strategies
• key product messages
• the scope of the rebrand and the activities it will entail

Our brief asked for a distinctive set of brand codes that make Attest instantly recognisable amongst our users and target audiences. We knew we wanted to inject some emotion and wanted our brand look and feel brought to life via the development of a new visual identity (this job would include defining colors, illustration style, iconography, photography, and art direction). As part of the rebranding process, we also wanted to create a style guide and tone of voice guidelines.

The new visual identity would need to be translated across our website, survey platform, content marketing, advertising, events, social channels, marketing materials, merchandise and into a new introductory video. We don’t have a physical product, but companies that do will also need to think about rebranding things like packaging, point of sales materials and shop fittings.

Step 4 – create a mood board

You can enhance your brief with a mood board that captures any initial thoughts or ideas you have in mind for your new brand identity. Perhaps you really like the idea of incorporating illustrations in your design, as we did, maybe you want a specific style of photography or there’s another brand you want to emulate? Spend time doing some research and finding examples that will help guide the design team tasked with the rebranding.

For a few weeks, we looked at our color palette, logo concepts, illustration and art direction to explore how these elements could come together to form our new brand – deciding what we liked, didn’t like and getting future brand inspiration. We used the online whiteboard tool Miro to collate pictures and notes into mood boards.

Step 5 – appoint a branding agency

If you’re going for a complete brand perception overhaul, you’ll probably want to bring in some outside expertise. Branding agencies are not cheap but the value they can add to your business makes them a worthwhile investment.

At Attest, we have an in-house design team but it’s small and they have lots of day-to-day work to keep up with, which is a big ask alongside conceptualizing and deploying a company-wide rebrand. For that reason, we decided to appoint a branding agency to assist with the rebranding.

Finding the right agency to collaborate with to bring the brand narrative and visual identity work to life was an extensive task. We contacted eight agencies and sent out a request for proposal (RFP) to four of them. When we received the proposals, we compared them side-by-side and circulated them among the wider team for feedback.

After careful consideration, we decided to work with Zag for our rebrand. Zag just so happened to be Attest “super users” so they understood the value of the product without us having to explain.

Step 6 – schedule a kick-off and sprint sessions

Working with a branding agency should be a collaborative process so you should be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get involved. During your kick-off meeting, you’ll be discussing the rebranding brief, brainstorming and exploring the ideas you’ve already had from both sides.

Based on our initial kick-off session with Zag, we were able to pull out things we should keep, push further and abandon all together in our future design system. From there, we were able to narrow to three potential ‘brand world territories’ (aka themes) that we wanted to explore: access, discovery and differentiator, which each had a different theory behind them.

In our next sprint session, Zag presented concepts around these themes and we decided we wanted to progress with two of them:

Access: open access to invaluable research

• Bringing a new role and emphasis on our Attest triangulation marque (logo).
• Visual language supported by a graphic toolkit that represents our reliable testing tools, helping users access accurate results from our consumer research platform.

Discovery: explore and unpack potential growth

• Focuses on how Attest helps users discover a new space to explore consumer insight and gain quality results in an ordered and effective way.
• The visual language unlocks new approaches to access data, providing different layers of consumer behaviour knowledge.

Eventually, we settled on ‘discovery’. Overall, we thought this territory was the strongest and had the most potential for success. We found it exciting because it challenges the status quo of our current positioning and would set us apart in our competitor landscape. It also aligned with our ambition to be different – projecting a strong, clever and unique brand personality. What’s the point of rebranding if we don’t plan on standing out!

With our chosen route decided, we began WIP visual development rounds. Further sprints on voice and tone sprints covered:

• Tone of voice principles – we wanted to inject warmth, energy and excitement
• Brand persona development – we went from ‘Pioneering Enabler’ to ‘Pioneering Architect’ to, finally, ‘The Supportive Pioneers’
• Persona principles – our initial traits were Conversational/Authoritative/Rousing but changed to become Friendly/ Confident/Enthusiastic
• Tagline – “Less Guesswork. More Confidence” was changed to“Growth without Guesswork” to adhere to the ‘rule of 3’, making it snappier

Step 7 – test your concepts

Once you have some mock-up designs for potential new logos, web pages, packaging or store designs, it’s wise to seek feedback before making final decisions. As well as allowing people within your company to have their say, you can see what consumers at large think by carrying out some creative testing.

As any challenger brand knows, a creative testing survey will let you show respondents different design elements and ask questions about them. Keeping it simple, you can ask people to select their favorite out of a series of designs, or you can be more scientific about it and do ‘mondaic testing’. The definition of this is showing each design to a different group of respondents, letting you see objectively which design scores the best.

For example, perhaps you want a logo that people describe as ‘romantic’ and you find that 40% of respondents select this word to describe logo A, but 65% choose it for logo B. Through creative testing, you can iterate and improve your brand assets until they are perfectly aligned with your business strategy.

Top tips for creative testing on Attest include making use of the ‘randomise question/answer order’ and ‘piping’ features to reduce bias and drill deeper into respondents’ sentiments.

Step 8 – create a brand toolkit

Once your visual identity and brand assets have been agreed upon, it’s time to compile everything into one handy toolkit. This will become a brand bible for anyone involved in marketing and communications for your company. What should your brand toolkit contain?

• An overview of your brand identity
• Your logo and variations of it
• Your color palette
• Your typography
• Rules for layout and alignment
• Brand illustrations and iconography
• Art direction principles
• Examples of your branding used across different applications i.e. landing page, social ad, products.

Your brand toolkit will be invaluable for communicating your rebranding strategy to business stakeholders and helping to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. It’s also very useful when you work with outside contractors, helping to quickly on-board them in your house style.

Step 9 – implement your new brand

The next step requires intense team hustle; implementing your rebrand will touch every part of your business. You’ll need to set out all the rebranding activities to be undertaken, assign each one to an individual and agree a time frame to work to. It’s advisable to use a project management tool so you can keep on top of progress (we use Notion).

You should also plan weekly meetings where each person can update the team on what they’ve been doing. It’s likely that some things will take longer than expected and you’ll run into a few blockers along the way, so try to be realistic with your schedule and leave time for ironing out any creases. If you have a tighter deadline, or you’re short on resources, it could be worth bringing in external development support.

Step 10 – relaunch your brand

This is the fun bit. Step 10 sees all your hard work come to fruition when you launch your new look to the company – and to the world! You should plan two relaunch dates; one internal and one external.

The internal relaunch should be a company-wide presentation explaining why the rebrand has been undertaken, showing off the new branding and detailing how it meets your marketing strategy.

This is important because not everyone will have been involved in the project and you want to get buy-in before going public. Before our relaunch event, we helped get staff hyped by giving them a sneak peek of our new signature colour – firecracker orange – and asking them how it made them feel.

The internal relaunch is also your chance to share your brand toolkit and set out any tasks you need staff to carry out, such as:

• updating email signatures
• updating personal social banners
• deleting and replacing company letterheads
• deleting and replacing presentation templates

Your external relaunch date will be when your new website goes live, your new packaging hits the shops and your new ads are published. Make some noise about this by sending out press releases in advance, giving out merch and inviting movers and shakers to a relaunch party (either in real life or online). If you’ve done your rebrand right, people should be as excited about it as you are!

After your rebrand

One more step to take after your rebrand has gone live is to find out what impact it’s had. Take a brand tracker ‘dip’ to see how metrics like brand awareness, purchase intent and brand loyalty have changed. It’s great to be able to take these figures to the board and show the true value of your rebranding project – yes, sometimes changing the colors or logo really is important!

And if you’re not brand tracking already, find out how it can help you measure the ROI of your brand building activities.

What do you think of our rebrand? Watch our brand video and see our new identity brought to life!

The post The Complete Guide to Rebranding in 2025 appeared first on Attest.

With iterative creative testing, you can refine and refine your assets until they reach peak performance – as long as you avoid making classic creative testing mistakes. The process allows you to test what impact different elements of your ads, such as the call to action, tagline, font types and colours or music, have on viewers.

By adding or taking away a single element with each test, you can see the difference it makes to your metrics – and you might be surprised at just how big of a difference small changes can make to your return on investment.

That’s where creative testing tools like Attest come in!

At Attest, we’ve seen clients gain a significant uplift in things like brand recall, perception and purchase intent, just by tweaking a few words, changing the size of a logo or adding a jingle. So, while the process can add an extra step or two to planning your campaigns, it’s well worth it. Read on to learn how to get started.

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How to get started with iterative creative testing 

Iterative testing is the process of basing tests on data gathered from previous tests. This means that you only start once you have settled on your creative concept and the assets that you want to run with. 

Before this, you may have tested various different ideas in order to find the strongest. Or perhaps you’ve already done some ad testing for this particular concept, are happy with the overall feedback received, and now want to optimise it. Either way, you should have some baseline data to design your experiments around (if you don’t, start with a quick creative testing survey). 

Now you need to analyse your data and decide where you’d like to see improvements and how they might be achieved. For example:

• Let’s say that 75% of respondents agreed they understood the message your creative was trying to convey. But when reading through the free text comments from the 25% who did not understand, you see that there’s a particular word or phrase that’s creating confusion. You run some copy testing with the aim of increasing understanding to 85%.
  
• Let’s say that your ad scores really well for likeability, but 30% of viewers can’t correctly identify the name of the brand or product being promoted. You change the voiceover to include three more mentions of the name in order to push identification upwards.
  
• Let’s say that 70% of your target audience say they’re likely to consider purchasing your brand after seeing your ad, but only 35% of those say they’re “very likely”. You want to improve this ratio, so you alter the call to action to see what impact it has. 

Don’t forget, while you might want to make multiple changes to your ad, each change needs to be tested in isolation. If, for example, you made all of the above changes to your creative and then tested it, you might find some metrics go up while some go down – and you wouldn’t be able to identify what it was that had actually shifted the needle.   

Setting up your survey for iterative creative testing

Watch our intro to creative testing for a beginner’s guide on how to make sure you nail your marketing creative ⬇️

When iteratively testing, it’s important that your surveys are sent to the same audience profile that was used for your original creative tests (i.e. your target audience). For example, if your baseline measurements come from millennials in the south-east, subsequent responses gathered from a nationally representative (nat rep) audience would not be comparable. 

But while you want to maintain the profile of the audience, you don’t want to ask exactly the same people each time you run a survey. That’s because they’ll be biased by their previous exposure to the ad and unable to respond neutrally to the changes you’ve made (even if they don’t consciously notice them). 

With Attest, you can reach an audience of 100m+ consumers in markets around the globe and precisely target who you want to talk to, based on a variety of demographics and custom qualifying questions. Because we have a huge pool of survey-takers, it’s easy to exclude those who have already responded to one of your surveys (just select which previous surveys to exclude in the dashboard).

When it comes to selecting audience size, you don’t need to worry about asking thousands of people every time. Usually, around 250-500 respondents will be enough for each survey. So, although iterative creative testing can involve sending out multiple surveys, it doesn’t have to be an especially costly exercise. 

Equally, it doesn’t have to take forever. A survey with a sample size of 250-500 people can fill in the space of a couple of hours, which means you can get pretty much instant feedback to the changes you make. 

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Knowing where to stop with iterative creative testing

The beauty of iterative testing is that it allows you to take a very strategic approach to designing your creative assets – we all know how easy it is to get carried away with ideas and sometimes lose perspective. 

Data removes subjectivity and lets you make changes that are evidence-based. It’s massively rewarding when you make a tweak that sends your metrics shooting up, but – like with any experiment – you won’t always get the results you want. You might implement a change that has a detrimental effect. On the other hand, you might make edits that have little or no impact at all. 

Trying to move the needle can become quite addictive, so it’s important to have a cut-off point. Be clear at the outset what you’re trying to achieve – choose one or two key areas to focus on instead of trying to shift every single brand awareness metric. And decide what the minimum acceptable uplift will be for each piece of creative or campaign.

Of course, you’ll never be able to get everyone to love your ad (or want to buy your product!) but making modest gains can still translate to increased sales or social buzz. And, remember, you’re not only gathering learnings for this campaign – you’ll be able to use the knowledge (like the fact your target consumers prefer the colour red to pink) for all your future creative projects. 

Try our new Concept Testing Template today.

Or if you want more strategies for supercharging your campaign planning? Download our free guide…

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You could use international market research to get a clear picture of the risks and business opportunities that lie ahead in countries you plan to export or expand to. It can include competitive analysis, research into how to resonate with consumers in different countries, as well as drilling down into legal, cultural, political and logistical aspects.

Why conduct international market research?

There can be huge differences between each different foreign marketplace that you might not have thought of or realized as an outsider looking in. For any international business, it’s important that you get quality primary data in all the countries you operate in, to make sure you’re not tone-deaf, and are able to optimize your products, processes, and promotion for each specific market.

Here’s a fantastic example of how international market research pays off. 

We’ve seen first-hand how companies like Klarna have benefited from doing thorough research and copy testing before expanding to new markets. Their qualitative research in Belgium uncovered a crucial piece of information: Belgian consumers didn’t like the name of the product they intended to launch there.  

Klarna turned to Attest to do a quantitative study, and created a survey to test different product names and to see what would convert best. In the end, a suitable name popped up out of the data and Klarna went ahead with a successful launch,

That’s just one way international market research can benefit your business. But of course, there’s more, so keep on reading.

Minimize risks when entering overseas markets

As with any type of market research, one of the main objectives is minimizing risk. 

You wouldn’t walk into a porcelain shop wearing a blindfold; you’d study the room, and move accordingly. 

Use market research to minimize the risk of entering a market that is already saturated, or where there’s no demand, or where you wouldn’t make a profit at the price point you’re offering… The world is your oyster. 

Get to know customers across different cultures

The world is getting more and more connected. There’s a surge of ‘digital nomads’ and people who say they are ‘citizens of the world’ when you ask them where they’re from. But, there are still plenty of cultural differences you should be aware of when it comes to selling products or services.

Studying consumer behavior in foreign markets is crucial for international market research. You could wonder about questions like:

• Who shops online more, Italians or Germans? And what does this mean for our localized online stores?
• Do car buyers in the US conduct their research differently than UK car buyers?
• Is getting your groceries delivered as big a thing in Spain as it is in Norway?

Don’t just assume there’ll be enough overlap between countries. You could be surprised by the difference in results. For instance, a passionate Italian grandmother might approach buying pasta very differently from a student in Budapest—so adjust your pricing, global market research, international marketing, distribution channels and more accordingly.

Identify business opportunities and market potential

Which countries still don’t have a product as awesome as yours? In which target markets are people currently buying large quantities of the product you’re selling—so much that the current producers can’t keep up? What emerging markets should you enter right now?

International market research helps you spot new business opportunities. You find out how large potential markets are, who your competitors are and how you could steal market share from them.

Don’t just look forward: look back too to see how the market has developed. What market trends have passed, and how did people react to them? What are the usual growth rates for businesses like yours?

Identifying the fastest growing markets and familiarizing yourself with the players in those will help you figure out your own competitive advantages, so you can enter new markets with confidence, being able to lead—not just follow. 

Not sure where to start? Say hello to our market analysis template! With this we offer you a clear idea of the type of questions you can ask. Use it as a starting point and tailor it to your needs to really get to know your market.

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Optimize spending and margins

It’s very likely that you have to tweak your usual strategies a little, depending on the market. In other countries there will be different distribution channels, production options and costs for selling. Getting insight into this before entering is crucial.

Look into which channels are available and gather information on suppliers, manufacturers and other partners you need. Having this info ready before launch will mean you can fuel your export plan with valuable strategic insights, ensuring you maximize your profit, and can deliver your products on time.

Make sure you’re compliant

We can’t stress enough how important it is that you get all the legal insights ready before entering a new market. Every country has different rules and standards, and not being compliant could be an expensive mistake. 

Find out what the required certifications and standards are, and what tests your products have to endure. Check if products or packaging need to be altered for specific markets with specific rules. 

Primary vs secondary international market research

Your international market research should be a mix of primary and secondary data, mixed to compliment each other to give you a thorough understanding of a new market.

Each research method comes with its own benefits, but combining the two gives you the best of both worlds. 

Secondary market research

Secondary market research is great to lay the groundwork in the market research process: you can use data and quantitative research that you can find online to get a good understanding of the market. Think market data and trade data, and specific trade statistics for a country or a product. 

The benefit of using secondary market research for this part is that it’s relatively quick, and cost-efficient. However, it can only be used for part of your research objectives, because the information is generic, not specified to your product and might not be up-to-date.

Primary market research

In comes primary market research. This is often done using online surveys, or by talking to experts in the foreign market you’re looking into. This is great to study your target customers from up close, or learn about the current market conditions from local experts. You can also use primary research to talk to local suppliers, for more successful export planning.

What to consider before starting the global market research process

Every form of market research should be done with care—international or not. After all, you’re going to be basing important business decisions on the outcomes of your research, so best be careful, right? Right. Here are some extra words of advice, to not let your adventure abroad be an expensive waste of time.

1. Markets change: bear in mind that if you do international market research just once, you’ll online have a static picture of what the market was once like. Markets are dynamic, and international markets react to each other—so make sure you keep an eye on relevant trends and market conditions, and follow up on your research regularly.
2. Inside information is best: when it comes to international market research, make sure you speak to the right people. A survey group that looks exactly like your target market, but ‘just’ has different nationalities, is likely not a good representation of who you are trying to research.
3. Be willing to act on the results, not just analyze them: allow the data you’ve collected to influence your decision-making process. This will help you create more defined objectives for your research, and make your approach to the research a lot more practical. It can help to make important stakeholders part of the research process.

How to conduct international market research: 4 strategies

1. Talk to local experts in potential markets

Sometimes you can have a long hard look at the data, but still not get a good feeling of what is actually happening inside a market. In those cases, it can be incredibly helpful to talk to local experts to add some qualitative flavor to your research dish. These can be suppliers, manufacturers, economic experts, business journalists or anyone else who can make the data you see come to life.

2. Dive into secondary data from governments

While we don’t recommend using only secondary research as a source for your market intelligence, it sometimes simply is the only option, especially if your budget is limited. In that case, make sure you pick the right sources. 

We recommend you start with government trade data and economic statistics, which are usually up-to-date and the most accurate. Be wary of sources from websites that could have tainted the stats for financial gain, or for PR or SEO purposes.

3. Talk to consumers using online surveys

How can you possibly talk to all those potential buyers in your target markets, let alone track your brand, without booking expensive plane tickets there? We’ll let you in on a secret: use Attest.

If you’re sending online surveys, you want to have the peace of mind that it is being completed by people who are in your target group. We’ve made sure of that, by giving you access to an audience of 150+ million people in 59 countries. Using Attest, you can very specifically segment your audience for hyper relevant results.

4. Use focus groups for more data

If you want to test some ideas or supplement your primary research insights with more qualitative market research data, focus groups can be a great way to move forward. Make sure that before flying out there you make sure you’re talking to relevant people who fit your target group description to a T.

Access more consumers with overseas market research

Set yourself up for success, wherever you choose to go. If your business is ready to expand overseas and is crossing borders, make the most out of our international market research platform. And if you’re in the States, here’s how the top market research companies in the US stack up.

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FAQs about market research in foreign markets

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We’re often talking about the importance of branding—for your business—but doing it right means also putting thought into your product branding. 

With the right approach, you can even successfully brand a standalone product, or make a single product the leading factor in your rebranding efforts. 

In this guide, we’ll cover all the product branding basics, and make it practical. We’ll also give you some real-life examples of successful product branding to draw inspiration from. 

What is product branding, and why is it important?

Think of your favorite product that you used this morning. Why is it your favorite? Why didn’t you buy its equivalent from another brand last time you were in the store? This is especially relevant for F&B brands.

Chances are, the price was similar. So was the smell, the ingredients, and other features. Then why did you automatically grab that one again, instead of taking a risk with the competitor?

Probably because that product, that brand, did a great job at product branding (or even brand extensions). It created a product that catches your eye, is easy to recognize, easy to connect with and ultimately builds customer loyalty.

That’s what all the world’s best products have in common: strong product branding, and loyal customers who like it enough to keep coming back.

Product branding is a crucial step to making your overall marketing strategy work. Think about this: you’ve put a lot of time and effort into creating a stellar strategy and brand. You’ve considered every detail—you know what tone of voice to convey, what colors work… 

But then when you create your product, you tone it down. For whatever reason: to fit in with the other products on the shelves, for instance; or to stay within budget.

But that could easily be one of the most expensive mistakes you’ll ever make, because it basically means your overall brand strategy goes to waste. 

Product branding is the branding that directly falls in the hands of your particular market, so it could be considered one of the most important factors in branding and marketing. 

Branded products always outperform products that play it safe—plus, people are willing to pay more for a product that comes with strong branding, that represents who they are and that they are willing to showcase in their home. 

Because let’s face it: does a Smeg fridge really cool your kombucha better than any other pastel-y fridge without the letters S, M, E and G on it? No. But heck, does it look cool.

Not convinced yet? Let’s look at the stats:

It takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember a brand. Here’s why that means you should invest in product branding: people will probably not come to your website 5 to 7 times. You’ll need to showcase your brand where consumers are most likely to bump into it, and often that’s in stores—meaning your products will have to do the heavy lifting.

Presenting a performance brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. Need we say more? In case we do: don’t forget that a store also counts as a platform. Make sure your products are as catchy as your TikToks and as well-thought-out as your Instagram posts, is what we’re saying.

Consistently using one color palette on your logo, products, digital content, and promotional material can drive your brand recognition up by as much as 80%. So if you have a funky pink-yellow color palette going on in your website, make sure your products match that.

40% of consumers will post photos on social media of products that come with unique branded packaging. And that goes way beyond Starbucks cups. Jewelry brands ship their goodies in almost unnecessarily pretty product packaging—but it gets shared loads, giving the brands a huge boost on social media through countless unboxing videos.

How corporate branding differs from product branding

You could see product branding as an extension of corporate branding. They have to be in line with each other. Product branding is where you make your corporate brand more tangible, touchable and can go all out with it. 

Corporate branding basically lays the foundation for all the ways your brand will communicate with customers. Your product branding strategy dictates how it will specifically do that through your products.

You can take certain elements from your corporate branding and choose to highlight them in your product brand. 

Do make sure these are the elements that are truly representative for your brand identity, that they are easy to recognize and that they make sense so showcase the product.

How to create a successful product branding strategy

It’s hard enough to create a great product that meets all your customers’ needs—it’s even harder to also create a product brand around that. But don’t panic: we’re here to help. 

Successful brands all have their own checklist when creating a new product with its own product branding strategy, so make sure to make your own as well—but draw some inspiration from these tips below.

Have a strong vision in mind

Dare to stand out. Because isn’t that what a product branding strategy is for? There’s no point in creating a product branding strategy that will help you fit in. A well-formulated vision is an essential element for any recognizable brand. 

Draw inspiration from Coca-Cola. When they were in the process of creating that iconic bottle we’ve all held in our hands, this was the brief:

Create a bottle that, when smashed on the floor into little shards, will still be recognized as the Coca-Cola bottle, even if you just saw one shard on its own.

Yes, that’s incredibly ambitious. Some product designers might even call it ridiculous or impossible—Coca-Cola’s probably did, until they set to work. 

But look at where it brought Coca-Cola: 94% of the world’s population recognizes the brand. And a huge number of people buy and consume Coca-Cola products, knowing very well that it isn’t the healthiest addition to their diet. 

Pay attention to your messaging and tone of voice

Got any Lush products in your bathroom? Go get one real quick and resist smelling it—but read the label instead.

Lush is a great example of how you can let a brand personality and brand voice shine through in product branding. 

They’ve perfected a tone of voice and are showcasing it even—or especially—in the finest print on their product packaging. 

Their product branding is also another place where they reinforce the company’s values, by explaining not only what the product is made of, but by who and when—showing that they are serious about doing things differently. 

Other brands might focus on how the product makes you feel, or focus on the type of people they target in their advertising campaigns. 

Lush, on the other hand, uses its products to communicate its mission and vision, and connects with people through loud and clear copy.

Make it recognizable by making it shareable

An important element of making product branding easy to recognize, is by making sure it spreads like wildfire. The perfect example? The Starbucks cups. 

Hate ‘em or love ‘em, but Starbucks knew exactly what visual elements would help them create a product branding that people want to share.

We can’t think of a single brand that leveraged people’s need to share their lunch and drinks better than Starbucks did. 

It’s visually appealing enough with its iconic logo, pretty neutral—making it fit into any Instagram post—and it comes with an element of personalization: your name (even when it’s misspelt) and the little hearts and smileys the baristas draw on the cups. 

Cute and useless? We think not: it’s just another way they unleash valuable customer interactions. 

Consistency is key

IKEA is not suddenly going to release premium products, or products with weird prints that don’t fit into any type of interior. 

They’re the leaders of consistency in product branding, maintaining the low costs, affordability, quality and recognizable features in front of other visual elements. 

IKEA is a distinctive brand in how it sticks to its company values and with that, builds an immense amount of trust with its customers.

Know your target audience

Did you know that Converse is owned by Nike? That’s right: since 2003 Nike is the parent company of the brand that sells shoes to virtually any teenager—and adults who have a certain vibe of coolness around them, you feel me?

Both brands come with a strong brand identity, but they are vastly different. Converse was made to dance in the mud during a festival. Nike is for people who wake up at 5.30am to go for a run. 

Nike did their market research right and decided that if they wanted to acquire the business of the festival goers, they couldn’t simply make a new product line with new Nike shoes. Instead, they chose to give that specific target market its own brand and product’s identity. 

Give your product a personality and backstory

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a good, red dress? Sure, there are countless options. But which one to get? The brand Laagam found a solution to that issue: make their dresses tell a story. 

And boy, did they find a story for their version of the little red dress: make it the one that Rachel Green wore, in Friends. Who wouldn’t want to dress like that? Immediately it becomes more than just another red dress: it represents an era and an icon, and you’ve just got to have it.

5 Benefits of a great product branding strategy

We’ve already touched on some of the statistics that show you just how important a strong product branding is, but there are some things you can’t just express in numbers. Here are five more benefits of investing in a great product branding strategy. 

1. Product branding helps you connect with customers

Let’s go back to Converse. We’re sure that Nike could have designed a shoe that some Allstar wearers could’ve been convinced to buy. But we all know how attached we can become to that one pair of dirty Converse. Sticking to the product’s brand was the best way to connect with customers.

The same goes for Apple users. Their target audience is not as much attached to the product itself, but more to what it represents. They become advocates for the brand and the product, because everything is just right.

2. Build loyalty to boost repeat purchases

What comes from customers who feel connected to a certain product? Repeat purchases!

With the right, fun product branding, people will buy from you over and over. You’ll be top of mind every time they need new shoes, a phone, shower gel or a cup of coffee when they’re in a new city. People like buying from the same company if they know the product is reliable and has its own identity. 

If you’re curious to find out how your brand is doing on brand preference and winning the hearts of customers, check these seventeen brand preference survey questions that measure customer loyalty.

3. Product branding contributes to overall brand awareness

There’s no point in creating a stellar brand and having an extensive branding process, and having bland products in store. Supercharge your branding by extending it to your products, to every last detail.

Your product is part of your marketing materials, and will therefore power up your ​​brand awareness efforts. Want to know how you’re doing on that? Use our brand tracker to find out how your branding is contributing to the success of your business.

4. Be the first brand customers recognize thanks to strong product branding

This is a benefit on its own. A strong product brand will stand out, both visually and emotionally. And in a store people usually go for the products they recognize, because nobody has time to go through all the other ‘new’ options and evaluate them. So, make sure your product packaging catches their eye before anything else does.

5. Protect your parent company with a separate product brand

Another reason Nike and Converse didn’t just become ‘one’, is because both have a strong product brand and by having a diverse line for both, they remain protected. 

Giving a specific product line and target group its own bespoke brand helps you protect the parent business from potential flops and allows for plenty of experimentation.

If you’re looking to launch a particular product that speaks to a specific market you are not used to, consider creating a sub brand or even keep it completely separate. 

This way, if your new brand speaks to different segments, you can go all out without doing any real harm to the company’s reputation or messing up its unique identity.

Get the results you want from product branding

Want to know if you’ve got your product branding strategy figured out, or if there are opportunities for improvement? Launch a brand positioning survey with a special focus on product branding strategies, to find out how individual products are influencing your brand image.

Want some help getting started? Check out our listicle of brand positioning survey questions.

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Consumer research is most exciting when it surfaces something completely counterintuitive, as was the case when The Big Prawn Co. investigated what customers wanted to see on their website. 

They found that visitors to their website  actually didn’t want to see plates of juicy prawns and shellfish – which is what they sell – they wanted imagery of people and fishing. The discovery came about when Claire Evans, Category Manager at The Big Prawn Co. surveyed consumers on Attest prior to a redesign of their website.

She says: “We recognised that our website just wasn’t doing our company justice. Most of the product we sell is under supermarket’s own labels but we also have our Big Prawn Co brand, plus we have people coming to the site to find information about where we source from and our sustainability credentials, so our audience is quite broad. 

“There are consumers that come to the website to look at recipe content, but we also try to explain our position as a company and how we’re sustainably sourcing and all of the CSR we do. Basically, we weren’t speaking to anybody because we’d become too confused. We’d ended up with a website that was trying to be everything to everyone and that was a recipe for disaster.”

We recognised that our website just wasn’t doing our company justice.

Claire Evans, Category Manager, The Big Prawn Company

Evans wanted to make sure that the new website was going to deliver what they needed it to, so they turned to Attest to get feedback on the content and imagery that they were proposing using.

“We were able to do that before and during the design process, which saved time and money,” she says. “We knew who we wanted to be looking at our website because a lot of them would be people we were directing there ourselves. So then we were able to filter and make sure that the survey respondents were part of that key target audience for us.”

She adds: “We can be really agile because we can have the answers back pretty much instantaneously, which means nothing gets slowed down.”

Communicating brand values

As well as discovering that food images weren’t really resonating with their target customers, The Big Prawn Co. learned that they needed to strike a better balance of content. This meant scaling back the recipes that had ‘taken over’ on the old site. Meanwhile, they found they could better communicate the values of the company through people-driven imagery. 

“It leads to people feeling that, as a brand and a company, that we are real people doing a real job,” Evans explains. “It’s much easier to get across the things that are important and that we care about when there are people involved in the imagery rather than just platefuls of food.” 

According to Evans, carrying out large-scale quantitative research through Attest (we have 125m respondents in 58 markets) gave The Big Prawn Co. confidence in the findings.

“It was really invaluable insight that we were able to draw on, and it came from a huge pool of people rather than just being something internal where we all have our own ideas and it’s hard to set those aside. It gave us a really clear understanding of how to make a fit for purpose website.” 

Empowering retail conversations 

Compelling discoveries haven’t been limited to The Big Prawn Co.’s website; they’ve also used Attest to research how consumers feel about the way specific retailers market shellfish. They’ve used this information to fuel conversations with buyers and improve not only how their products are sold, but also the category as a whole. 

Evans says: “We asked what shoppers thought about the market, who they thought had a good range, who they didn’t rate so highly, and why. It sounds obvious but sometimes we just don’t delve into that explanation enough. That gave us really detailed insight that we could then take to the customer we were working with, with specific targeted actions for them.” 

This included the insight that there wasn’t enough information about sustainable sourcing on pack. They also discovered that it was hard for consumers to differentiate between the retailers’ core shellfish range and their premium range because the packaging was very similar. 

“When the retailer was told this and they could see the evidence, with the physical quotes from people, it was really powerful. They definitely realised this was an issue they needed to address. Overall, that’s a basic thing; if you want to trade a shopper up within a category, it’s a bit difficult to do it if they don’t even see the value in the trade up offering that’s on the shelf there. So really clear recommendations were coming out from that.” 

When the retailer could see the evidence, with the physical quotes from people, it was really powerful.

Another crucial learning was that the retailer’s range wasn’t always delivering what shoppers needed in terms of pack size, shellfish species, and value for money. Evans and her team set out to learn exactly what people wanted from the store, recognising that every retailer is different, with unique shopper demographics. 

“You cannot take what’s successful in one place and plonk it down into another retailer and think the same thing will happen because it doesn’t work that way,” she says. “By using Attest we’re getting opinions from shoppers that are bespoke. It gives us the ability to do something different for all of our retail partners. The bottom line is we’re then giving more choice to the shopper and a better eating experience for the consumer afterwards, because what they want to eat is more likely to be on the shelf.” 

Consumer insights for brands of all sizes

Evans is keen to stress that size should not hold brands back from accessing consumer research; from small shrimp to big fish, there’s a solution for everyone. As a challenger brand, The Big Prawn Co. was attracted to Attest because of the platform’s ability to scale with their needs.

She says: “Insight has played such a huge role recently in our success in working with more retailers and it helps us to prove that we’re a credible supplier, because we are a much smaller company compared to some of our competitors in the industry. 

“As we are more of a challenger company, we haven’t had a huge focus on insight so it was really important to find an affordable solution for our business. Traditional data is brilliant but it’s not always affordable for smaller businesses. But having a small budget isn’t a barrier to success.”

Insight has played such a huge role in our success in working with more retailers.

Being able to access thousands of target consumers when they need to via Attest means The Big Prawn Co. can understand what people want more than ever before. It’s helping them look to the future and anticipate trends.

“Attest has been really helpful to us with that mission. We can ask the right questions to the right people, and we’re using it as a guide to our NPD, which means our products have a better chance of success if they do make it to shelf. But more importantly, for our retail partners we can create actionable strategies for them as well. It’s about the challenger brand opportunity to disrupt the market and, ultimately, give more choice to shoppers.” 

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Think about solutions to climate change and you’ll no doubt picture things like wind turbines and solar panels, but it’s moving away from obvious imagery like this that’s helped Clim8 Invest to really connect with their target audience. 

Clim8 Invest, a London-based climate impact investment app, made the discovery that there were better ways to get their message across thanks to creative testing. It started when they were planning their first ever digital video campaign and had two very different ideas for the creative, which they needed to choose between. They worked with Attest to carry out some creative testing to see which ad performed best among their target customers. 

“Of the two ads that we were testing, one route was very expected, showing wind turbines and electric cars and what the future looks like,” says Ilona Sediha, Marketing Lead at Clim8 Invest. “The other one was warm and human. It was about this feeling of doing something great without practically mentioning climate change or these solutions.”

Tapping into the minds of target consumers

Sediha and her team wanted to find out which ad people preferred and why, but they also wanted to know how respondents interpreted the ad’s messaging. How well did they understand what Clim8 Invest do? To find out, they used open text questions letting respondents answer in their own words – something which Sediha, who has a background in psychology, values highly.

“You actually get the most insight from people verbatim. Just ask and they will tell you. Attest’s respondents are really happy to do it, which is great. Some people would leave sentences and sentences of things if you let them!”

The research proved very illuminating for Clim8 because viewers of the ‘more human’ ad actually understood the brand’s mission better. It showed that Clim8 needed to make a step-change to their marketing because they had previously defaulted to showing people what the future looks like.

In the first ad, they would give you specifics but they didn’t actually give the essence.

Ilona Sediha, Marketing Lead

“In the first ad they would tell you, oh, you invest in energy solutions or you invest in cars. So they would give you more specifics, but they didn’t actually give the essence. Whereas if you kept it completely aspirational, they got the main message that we are investing in reversing the effects of climate change.”

Sediha adds that they really wanted the video to deliver a feeling: “Frankly, I don’t care if they know how it’s done, as long as they understand that this is what we do. And then they can go on the website, download the app and find out more this way. It’s not the advertiser’s job to explain completely what you do in 30 seconds. It’s just to entice the interest.”

Honing the details

Creative testing can do so much more than tell you which ad people like best; you can dig deep to find out exactly what they like, what they don’t like, and how your creative can be improved. Sediha was surprised to find that respondents to Clim8’s survey had very strong opinions about a dog that appeared in their ad. 

“One thing they said was, do you wanna try a different dog? We actually did in the end because if 15 people tell you it’s the wrong breed of the dog, you can’t ignore it. We ended up with a dog that was much smaller and cuter than before.”

If 15 people tell you it’s the wrong breed of dog, you can’t ignore it.

Ilona Sediha, Marketing Lead

Sediha says Attest makes it easy to get this level of detail – even for people who aren’t research professionals. Her team started the research project with Attest’s creative testing template, which she modified to their needs. She then used the platform’s demographic filters to target Clim8 Invest’s consumer base of slightly older and wealthier individuals.  

She explains: “Because we are an investment product, it’s our duty to not advertise to people who are perhaps at the level where they’re more likely to have unpaid credit card debt. So therefore we removed households within the lower income limits and upped the percentages of people over 35. 

“In digital, you can obviously pick the audience. We did exactly the same thing in Attest, just to make sure that we were asking the right people and it’s really useful.”

Connecting on a deeper level

Following the creative testing, Clim8 Invest produced the full version of the audience-chosen video ad, and the exercise saved them money on having to do full production for both video options. 

“Previously, you’d have to invest in production, then spend money to actually launch the ad, and then test it with people by paying for advertising. Creative testing lets you skip all of that and just go with a version that is more likely to perform well.” 

And perform it did! The video ad was launched programmatically in the UK, and the results were impressive, achieving VTR (view through rate) of 69% and CTR (click through rate) of 0.71%, both significantly above benchmarks. 

We revised all our digital formats – you won’t see a wind turbine from us anymore.

Ilona Sediha, Marketing Lead

“We used a media provider to help us buy programmatically across digital. And they said they hadn’t seen a higher clickthrough rate for a pre-roll ad before in our competitive set. Off the back of that, we revised our other digital formats and conversion rates improved. So you won’t see a wind turbine from us anymore.”

According to Sediha, Clim8 are now able to connect with people on a deeper level, communicating that those who invest sustainably are doing great things for the planet, and for their loved ones. 

“It really helped us improve our positioning,” she says. “So we now feel and look very different to some other sustainable investment providers out there who still talk about electric mobility and all the technical things, trying to talk to the rational side of people’s brains. Whereas we say, let other people do this education and let’s use advertising to give people hope.”

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Your local family doctor or nearest hospital will most likely not give you a survey with your prescription on your way out, but there are certainly ways in which the healthcare industry can gather valuable information about its ‘target audience’. 

In this guide we’ll highlight why market research is so important for the healthcare sector, how you can use it to improve your health systems and how to conduct your research in a way that’ll give you actionable insights.

Understanding healthcare market research

Healthcare market research is done to learn how to improve health services for people, and how to get patients to pick your health care facility, service or product. In that sense, it’s less about selling, but more about providing the right information through the right channels, and having a really beneficial solution available to patients.

Why is healthcare marketing research so important? 

If you hear the words healthcare marketing research together, you might think that feels odd: healthcare isn’t typically something that needs to be marketed, it should be something people simply get when they need it. 

And that’s precisely why market research is so important for forward-thinking professionals in the healthcare industry. By finding out what people need and want from the healthcare industry, providers and brands will be able to give them services and products that are truly great. 

Below, we’ve listed some reasons why healthcare companies and patients benefit from market research.

Help people find the help they need

Even as patients, or especially as patients, people won’t simply ‘buy’ anything healthcare providers sell.

In other industries, it’s all about creating a demand or convincing people to choose your product or service. In healthcare, it should be about making sure that the people who need a certain service can easily find it. 

Think of it as inbound marketing, but with a shorter ‘sales funnel’. The healthcare industry is confusing enough as it is, and people want to see and know their options as quickly as possible. With healthcare marketing research, you can learn how to do that for them.

Patient satisfaction is crucial for improvements

For many patients, the barrier to go to see any healthcare professional, use a healthcare product or have some treatment can be very high. And this is totally understandable: they don’t know what to expect, and they’ve probably heard some horrific stories of others. 

Patient satisfaction should be taken very seriously by all healthcare companies. It’s not all about the treatment and whether that’s successful or not—even though that’s obviously the main objective. 

How easy was it for a patient to get help? How did they find the information they needed, and how clear was this? How were they treated?

By improving these ‘secondary’ factors, you won’t just improve the experience of patients, but also of the ones treating them. 

Improve business operations and services

What’s good for your patients and market, is also good for business. If you want to make informed decisions for your healthcare practice, don’t just perform internal investigations.

You can often give that knowledge a lot more context by talking to patients, suppliers and any other partners you work with. 

Improve healthcare—for everyone

A market analysis can also be used to simply start understanding your patients better. From specific research into women, minorities, teenagers, and senior citizens, for instance, will help you make your communications and the care you provide more inclusive, and therefore better. You can take away any possible barriers and start taking care of everyone equally well.

Examples of healthcare market research

There are countless research topics worth diving into for medical professionals. Which healthcare practices need improvement according to patients, what’s possible in the world of medical devices, and how can a medical organization improve from a marketing perspective?

We’ll give you some examples of types of market research and key markets you can look into.

Market research aimed at patients

What’s the most obvious part of the market for the healthcare industry? The patients of course! You can learn so much more from them than just satisfaction stats.

• Test your branding and messaging on a specific market segmentation. How are senior citizens reacting to your brand, in comparison to young families, for instance?
• When developing a new product or service, find out what patients think about it with a new product development survey. Test your ideas with the people who will be using it. 
• Build strong consumer profiles to better cater to your patients’ needs. With qualitative interviews, focus groups and surveys, you can learn what every customer needs.
• Improve patient experience: what people experience asides from their treatment has a significant impact on how they perceive your organization and if they’d recommend it to others.
• ‘Buying’ journey research: how do people find you? What are important touchpoints and where could you improve the way you give people information?

How to make health market research data actionable?

If you want your research efforts to be worthwhile, you need to start every piece of research by defining what you want to do with it. Because this goes beyond nice-to-know or looks-great-in-a-powerpoint: you conduct market research to learn what you can do better, and how. 

We’ll dive into the steps to conduct healthcare market research below, but before you get started you need to have two things: 

• A clear objective
• Influential decision-makers involved

By having a historically-proven market research goal that’s connected to a practical reaction, it’ll be easier to select high-quality respondents and get actionable insights. 

And by having someone on board who is influential enough to take the newfound insights to the boardroom and make actual changes, you’ll know that your research and investments will be put to great use.

How to do healthcare and medical market research in 8 steps

There’s no framework set in stone that dictates how you should exactly conduct healthcare market research, but there are some milestones that you shouldn’t miss, some boxes you should tick. 

We’ve put these in chronological order for you, although we do advise you to do your due diligence and see if you are still meeting previous standards when going through these steps. Here’s what you should do for successful market research in the healthcare sector.

Step 0: Have a goal

You know this one’s important because it’s step zero – it’s a no-brainer. 

We’ll repeat it because it’s such an important one. Make sure you don’t start your research based on a whim. Define your goal—what are you hoping to achieve with your market research? Include what you will be looking into, why, and think ahead on what might need changing based on the results you’ll find.  

Step 1: Bring decision-makers on board

Make sure everyone knows what the research is about, what the goal is, and have them prepare for making it all come true. There are a lot of stakeholders in any healthcare market research, so it’s important to have them all involved. Don’t just show up with the results at the end of the ride—make sure they tag along from day one.

Step 2: Select the audience

Now, this, of course, depends on the goal of your research. But we would like to remind you of the value you could bring on board by including extra related, target groups.

For instance, if you are investigating waiting times and patient satisfaction, it can help to not just survey patients—ask nurses who know what’s happening on the floor, so you can give more context to your data. 

Here are some examples of important audiences for health care market research.

• Patients and other people using health services. These could also be healthy people, like patients’ families, or people using health services that aren’t related to disease.
• Primary care practitioners, such as general practitioners, specialists, nurses, and pharmacists.
• Secondary care practitioners like consultants, caregivers, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and more
• Healthcare administrators, from board members to purchases and government officials.

Step 3: Take care of privacy

The way you handle data and take care of the privacy of your respondents is always important, but in this type of research, it’s all the more crucial. 

Make sure that any market research tools you use are compliant with the regulations that matter to you, and that everyone using them knows how to keep data and privacy in check. Also, communicate clearly to your respondents how you will be handling data.

Step 4: Choose the right research methods

If you conduct healthcare market research, you have several sources to choose from. Of course, primary sources will be more relevant than secondary ones (because you’ll end up with the data you originally needed, not second-hand data that was gathered for someone else’s use). But it doesn’t hurt to get your foundation right—especially in the early stages of your healthcare market research. 

If you talk directly to patients or providers, you’re doing primary market research. This can range from qualitative research like focus groups to more quantitative research like online surveys, to in-depth interviews. If you dive into existing reports and studies, you’re doing secondary market research. It’s always best to combine those, to give more context to the data you’re gathering. 

Step 5: Pick a platform

You’ll want to pick a platform and tool that has it all. That will make it easier to work with, and ensures that you have a grip on where all your data is being stored.

Using a platform like Attest gives you all that, and then some: we help you set up an airtight survey and make sure you can use the platform in the best way possible. As for privacy concerns, you can give the right people exclusive access so all data is safe—perfect for research, especially in healthcare settings. 

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Step 6: Review the results

Time to look at the results! It’s key that you interpret these the right way—which all starts with asking the right questions. Get all stakeholders on board when reviewing the data, so you don’t miss any important angles. 

Step 7: Start implementing, stat!

This is the stage in which the magic happens. Translate your qualitative and quantitative market research services to action points. Make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Step 8: Measure more than once

If you have your SMART goals in place and start implementing, it’s crucial that you also follow up. For instance, if you’re looking to improve patient satisfaction, make sure to measure again after a while to see if you’re on the right track.

Tips for an effective healthcare market research survey

Like with any other survey, a healthcare market survey shouldn’t be too difficult of a task for respondents, and there are some rules to keep in mind to make it a success. As healthcare is a specific category however, we’ve included some last top tips to make sure you make the most of it.

Use the right platform 

The platform you use for your market research is where it all comes together: privacy, survey results, patients, and researchers. It’s where you’ll read the results from, so it needs to be crystal clear. Take your time to choose one that’s right for you.

Keep your questions simple

Your respondents should not be the ones doing the hard work. Make sure your survey is easy to understand and easy to fill in. The right platform—something like Attest—will also help you with this.

Keep it short

If you’ve established a clear objective and topic for your research, and picked an audience with care, you can skip a lot of questions that are just fluff. If you find yourself asking for a lot of details about a demographic, ask yourself if you’ve defined your audience well enough.

Recruiting respondents

Are you struggling to find respondents for your survey? Make sure you are asking in the right way, and communicate clearly why you are doing this. People love being part of the solution, they just want to know upfront why they are sharing their experiences. 

Be clear about privacy

We can’t stress it enough: healthcare market research requires strict adherence to data protection standards. Check and then double check if the systems you’re looking to use live up to your standards. Also make sure that you can communicate clearly to respondents how their data is being used and stored.

The Experts’ Guide to Brand Tracking

How to look at the impact of things like audience reach, panel diversity, and survey design to help you decide whether your current brand tracker is up to scratch.

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