Brand Identity Research: How a Radio Station Rebranded With Help of a Community
Karen de Visch is Senior Research Consultant at Profacts, a Belgian research agency. In this article we look at how they used a research community to help a radio station re-define their brand identity.
The Challenge
Like many market research agencies, Profacts does projects in many different sectors. They have projects that revolve around advertising and quantitative research. But also qualitative research, like focus groups and one-on-one interviews are part of Profacts’ research palette.
Brand Identity Research
As a senior consultant Karen performs quantitative and qualitative research. But she likes that variation. Because she has a strong affinity with online work she often does online qualitative research projects.
Karen explains: “Our first community project was brand identity research for a prominent radio station. They were interested in changing their direction a little bit. Therefor our research focused on understanding how listeners felt. About the different artists and voices out there. But also how the company’s slogan was perceived. And what other general impressions of the company were.
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Combining Several Methods
Frequently, a community platform combines tools like surveys with forum discussions or online journals. To clarify, Karen continues: “Questions like this call for a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. That’s why a research community is ideal!”
The Solution
User Experience
When searching for platform providers suited for brand identity research they found CMNTY. “What convinced us was the ease of use of the software. The platform has an amazing user interface! It looks great and it is very easy to find your way around.”, Karen explains.
Testing Several Brand Identity Ideas
Profacts presented the research community with new ideas for the company’s brand identity. They monitored, over a series of months, how member opinions adjusted to several new directions.
Karen explains: “It was actually a very extensive research project. We wanted to change the company’s brand. But at the same time, it needed to stay recognizable to their fan-base. Luckily, CMNTY Platform gave us the tools for that.”
The Results
At the end their first community study Karen was amazed by how many clear suggestions she had gathered for her client.
“In our first week, we took a close look at what community members noticed and mentioned about the brand identity. We collected lots of feedback. We studied it closely and made small changes to the brand concept. In the second week (a couple of months later) we tested our new concept to make sure that reactions were positive.”
Thousands of Contributions
Karen was surprised to receive so much feedback from the members. “The community was very much fitted for brand identity research. Our community made gathering research and insights easy. Getting over 4000 contributions from just 100 community members feels amazing!!”