Quantifying the need for Brand research

[SST]

I'm hoping to get some help here with what is a somewhat perplexing question.

We're about to institute some brand research for a client and they are looking for a way to quantify the need for this research. While it seems fairly obvious that a brand with very little information on customers would understand the idea of brands that know their customers better can actually better serve their needs, wants, etc. and therefore are better able to change their behavior. Marketing does understand this, Finance doesn't.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks

[mrobles]

I hope they just need to get an idea of how the research could lead to positive ROI, instead of the actual ROI, which I don't think would even be possible to measure ahead of time.

The easiest way to do this would probably be a literature search for companies that have seen increased revenue as a result of market research. It would still be hard to pull out the isolated effect of market research vs. other marketing efforts, distribution, operations, etc, but it would be a start.

But if you need a different method, here are a couple of ideas...

Brand research is a broad term so I'm not sure what kind of study you have in mind. But you mentioned knowing your customers better so I'll assume customer segmentation could be your focus. With customer segmentation, you'd be identifying groups of people most likely to buy your product. Then you could set up a calculation like: This group is more X% more likely to buy our product than other groups. So if we market our product to them, we'd expect Y% more sales, which will translate into $Z of additional revenue. Of course, you won't know the exact numbers until you actually do the research, but maybe you can plug in a hypothetical for illustrative purposes.

Or if you're talking about research on your company's tagline, you could set up a "quick and dirty" concept test with two parallel sets of sample being used - one sample sees a company logo with tagline, product description, picture, and price. The other sample sees all the same elements with only the tagline changed. Make sure one tagline is very good and one is very bad so there is enough variation in the responses. Then pray that there's enough variation in purchase intent between the two samples to make your point.

Good luck!