Article by ICG member Paul Griffiths for QRCA Views.
Insight industry growth expert Paul Griffiths explores the most cost-effective and easily executed ways to grow your research partner brand. Regardless of whether you are a qualitative solopreneur, part of a small qualitative shop, or the leader in a large agency, there are ways you can build brand salience and make sales activity more impactful that don’t require big marketing budgets
One of the challenges I experience all the time working with clients, especially from the owners and leaders of smaller qualitative research firms, is this:
“Why, Paul, should I invest in my firm’s brand? I’ve done a bit of marketing, here and there over the years, and it is expensive, and it doesn’t ever seem to create any positive commercial impact or sales.”
My succinct and probably quite frustrating response is this:
“If you want to grow your firm in the medium to long term, you need to build the profile of your brand. That cannot be a one-off or occasional marketing activity. You need a focused marketing plan to be consistently invested in and executed in the medium term.”
The response from my client or prospective client, I’m sorry to say, is generally a groan, a raising of the eyebrows, and a shrug of the shoulders. Then, a slightly more constructive conversation takes place six to nine months later, when the realization lands that changing nothing but expecting a different outcome is not really a strategy that leads to growth.
But why is this? Why, as an industry, are we not that focused or invested in trying to make our brands famous?
As owners or leaders in very small qualitative businesses, why do we think that building a brand profile is not as applicable to us and how we grow and ensure our firms are successful?
There are many smaller shops and solopreneurs that do an excellent job of building their brands so that they are well-known and well-considered by clients. I know as I’m lucky enough to work with some of them. As a solo consultant myself, the success of my own business, over more than a decade, is predicated on the principles of building a brand that I espouse. I am literally a man in a shed, yet much of what I suggest, I also do myself—a qualitative research business and a consultant have very similar pressures in terms of time and budget.
Especially in a highly competitive market, where client budgets are under pressure, and technology disruption has never been greater, why do we not invest in brand and growth? In the current market, I am confident in making the assertion that if you are not building your brand, you are likely going to suffer from declining sales and profits.
What I am interested in exploring is how we can raise our brand game as an industry—how research and insight agencies can operate at a higher level of marketing savviness, punch above their weight with limited resources and budgets, and grow their brands.
Seminal Brand Thinkers
As a starting point for thinking about how you can grow your qualitative firm’s brand, I refer you to the most seminal brand thinking of the last 10 years (or, at least, I think it is!). I’m referring to the work of Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
As brand experts and marketing scientists, they have looked at empirical evidence for how investing in brand building and growth relate to each other. What causes brands to grow? Their analysis and conclusions are compelling, especially in the B2B marketing world that we inhabit as leaders and owners of qualitative research agencies.
The evidence and argument that they present (and I’m very much summarizing) is that for your brand to grow relative to your competition, you need to make sure that at the moment of purchase, your brand is the one that comes to mind—that your brand has what Sharp calls “mental availability” or “brand salience.” If you want to go into detail, I’d heartily recommend Byron Sharp’s book, How Brands Grow, and the sequel, How Brands Grow, Part 2.
Just so we are clear, high mental availability is when a person has high awareness of the brand and knows what it does and what it stands for and wants to purchase it. It is not just awareness—in the sense of “I am aware of the brand”—it is a deeper sense of acceptance that this is a brand you are willing to buy. For example, if you ask me what car brands I know (awareness), this is different from the car brands I would actually purchase (based on my knowledge of the brands, what sort of cars they are, why they suit my needs, and what I might need to pay to purchase them). Personally, Ford might have high brand awareness, but Skoda has the highest mental availability for me.
Now we know, when we are selling qualitative market research and insight services and products, that it is a potentially complex customer journey. There may not be a single point of decision for the purchase, and much of the time, you are in a competitive bid or pitch process. In the more drawn-out pitch process, there are vital instances where the power of your firm’s brand can have an influence.
For example, initially, you need your firm to be in the pitch process. That means you need to have good brand salience when the client is putting the pitch list together. This is true of small firms and solopreneurs as well as bigger firms.
When it comes to the decision about which firm to commission, if you have invested in brand building and mental availability, all that rich and compelling positive sentiment you have built up in the minds of the purchasers and stakeholders helps influence and makes the rationale for choosing your firm more powerful and likely to succeed, even in the most rational procurement process.
I would also add that investing in and building your qualitative firm’s brand will help you win work from your existing and current clients, as well as support the acquisition of new clients. Brand building adds as much value to existing client growth and maintenance as it does for new business development. So, even if new client acquisition is not a priority right now for your firm, brand building will help your firm win more revenue from your existing relationships.
Stages in the Purchasing Journey
So, how can you go about building your qualitative firm’s brand?
I think it is helpful to think about the different stages that your client must go through in their decision-making process and how these stages can be positively influenced by your brand-building activities. This is how you create, build, and keep your brand salience for your qualitative firm. These are as applicable to all qualitative firms, both big and small.
The purchase journey stages, as I think of them, are as follows:
- Awareness Creation
- Engagement and Nurturing
- Sales Activation
- Purchase Decision
Taking each in turn, if done well and consistently, brand building should achieve the following with your target clients:
- Make them aware of your brand
- Help them be aware of a business problem that they have
- Make them understand that you have a solution to solve that problem
Stage 1: Awareness Creation
Brand-building activities that you can use at this stage include your website, social media such as LinkedIn, advertising, self-created PR, interviews in publications or journals or on podcasts, etc. I have seen small and micro qualitative firms use these activities to build their awareness. You may not need to execute all of them at once, but most can be done with lesser amounts of time or investment.
For example, here in the U.K., there are regular webinars delivered to client-side networks and to industry bodies by solopreneurs and small qualitative firms. This is because the owners or leaders of these small firms have made a conscious decision to submit papers or ideas for presentation to these organizations. They are willing to invest time (not necessarily money!) in these activities. Often, the successful smaller qualitative firms are better at persuading clients to cowrite or present these webinars and papers than the bigger firms, where there is less of a personal relationship.
Membership in one of the research industry associations (like QRCA) can be a great and relatively inexpensive way to build your industry profile, network, and learn from others. Certainly, here in the U.K., these associations are increasingly focused on attending conferences and building bridges to the client side. These are useful channels to explore to build your firm’s brand.
Stage 2: Engagement and Nurturing
Turning next to engagement, once a target client is aware of your brand, you need to take them through a nurturing or engagement process. Your brand-building activity for this stage should be about proving relevance, helping potential clients evaluate your offer and value proposition, and making sure you are top-of-mind.
Crucially, this is also where you can start to use your brand building to gather and qualify leads. So, here, your brand-building activity might include webinars, gated case studies and white papers, and newsletters—any activity that means there is a value exchange between you and the possible client—so they get the benefit of your wisdom and experience, and you get their email and contact details.
Again, the necessary investment to do these sorts of activities can be small. There are free versions of customer relationship management (CRM) systems that small qualitative firms and solopreneurs use to generate and send out newsletters and email content. Let me reiterate; this is perfectly possible for the smallest of firms. It requires time and effort but virtually no money to use a CRM to create and disseminate a monthly newsletter.
LinkedIn is an obvious platform to share and disseminate content you have created for free. Remember, the white paper you write, say, on how qualitative research and AI can combine to create deeper insights, can also be a series of LinkedIn posts, a blog on your website, and even a video thought piece you film on your phone when you are out walking the dog.
Related to other non-written content, there are podcasting platforms that are free, which have very straightforward editing and publishing capabilities. Several individuals and small qualitative firms I’m aware of are starting to experiment with this as an engagement tool.
Another engagement activity that small firms and solopreneurs can use is awards submissions. Making an award submission with a client is a terrific way to generate materials for your website and circulate them to prospective clients. If you are a member of the Insights Consultants Group, for example, you can submit for an award that is presented at the Market Research Society Awards on an annual basis.
Obviously, this ability to contact a potential client is key when we move further down the purchase path to sales activation. When you are actively communicating with potential clients to see if they would be willing to meet with you, your brand building plays an important role in reinforcing this—it gives you content to use in outreach campaigns; it provides context and credibility. Sales activation without brand building, without that investment in awareness and engagement, is far less effective and efficient.
Stage 3: Sales Activation
With sales activation, you might wish to do this yourself. I have seen small qualitative firms (including one-person firms) very successfully use LinkedIn as a sales activation tool. Again, it is an investment of time by the owner of the firm or the solopreneur, but it does not necessarily need to cost money. As already mentioned, a free CRM platform can enable you to send out email campaigns. Equally, I have small agency clients that invest in sales using a fractional business development agency, say once or twice a year; they use partners or individuals who are specialists in the research and insights world.
Stage 4: Purchase Decision
Finally, brand building has a crucial role to play in the purchase decision process. The business insight consultancy Gartner (www.gartner.com/en) talks about “decision confidence,” which is your client’s desire to believe and affirm that they are making the best decision about whom to work with. Having decision confidence not only increases the likelihood of securing the sale in a competitive pitch, but it can increase the value of the sale. Your brand building, if done well, will contribute to decision confidence and can help you get over the line and secure that valuable commission.
Some smaller firms ensure they are reinforcing this “decision confidence” and continue to build their brand salience through attendance at events (virtual or in-person), offers to present proposals in person (or at least online), and sending relevant content and articles to their prospective clients during the pitch process and afterward, even if they have been unsuccessful.
Call to Action
To summarize and suggest a call to action: how ironic is it that, as an industry, we have clients that spend considerable sums of money with us, as qualitative research firms, to help them grow their brand equity and salience? At the same time, most of us practice so little of what is savvy brand building. Yet, the path to sustainable and long-term growth, based on empirical evidence, as well as good marketing and sales sense (I would argue), is about creating and investing in your firm’s brand.
It is not easy. It does require planning, investment of time (definitely) and money (maybe), and good execution capabilities. But in this market and the conditions we work in, as the leader or owner of a qualitative research firm, building your firm’s brand salience with existing clients and potential new ones is the key to achieving growth and commercial success, in the medium- to long-term.
John Ricketts has been working in the market research agency since 1997 – he now has grey hair. In that time he delivered technical and security support services to research agencies, freelancers, CATI centres, and viewing studios. John left the industry for 3 years to develop his cyber security skills further by assisting Enterprise and Government organizations with security governance , risk and compliance activities.
In our last article, Learn, Lara and I explored how reflection and realignment help create clarity and awareness to make smart, timely decisions, and to foster a culture of purposeful reflection to support performance. But sustainable growth requires more than periodic check-ins, it demands a commitment to continuous evolution.
