A must-read guide for CMOs
SHANGHAI, May 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Kantar Group, the world's leading brand data insights and strategy analysis company, has released THE BLUEPRINT FOR BRAND GROWTH, which integrates Kantar's breakthrough developments in brand building over the past decade to guide brand builders to effectively drive brand growth.
As an indispensable partner to strong brands, Kantar continues to study how companies can build strong and profitable brands. This year, for the first time, Kantar matched a huge amount of consumer attitude data with behavioural data, and invested in the company's top brand experts, data scientists and analysts to refine the root causes of brand growth to arrive at the report.
The Brand Growth Blueprint will help brand builders grow their brands and anticipate and create opportunities to increase brand value. Based on mainstream brand growth theories, the report answers questions that cannot be explained by brand penetration alone, brand availability in the consumer psychology and physical world, and proposes new brand growth factors.
In days of general budget crunch, marketers can't afford to spend as much as they want—they have to make tough choices about what to do and what not to do. In the Brand Growth Blueprint, Kantar introduces the brand growth engine and three growth accelerators, guiding brand builders to use data smartly to launch them. The specific actions will depend on the current state of the brand, including the size of the brand, the stage of brand development, the category of the brand, the product purchase cycle, the brand competitive landscape, and the possibility of future category expansion.
Kantar believes that the engine of brand growth is "
Create meaningful differentiation in the minds of more people"（Be Meaningfully Different To More People），而三大加速器则为：占领更多消费者心智（Predispose More People）、强化品牌存在感（Be More Present）及找到增长新空间（Find New Space）。 它们之间互相关联，品牌主可以基于三大增长加速器落实工作计划。
Brand owners can start by assessing how strong their brand is 'meaningful differentiator' and looking for strategic opportunities to create stronger functional and emotional connections in the minds of consumers to create differentiation.
Predispose More People: Increase the likelihood of your brand being purchased by capturing more consumers. Invest in exposure and experience to give consumers a correct understanding of the brand; Let people always think of the brand and remember its meaningful differentiation.
Be More Present: Optimize marketing investments, improve the shopper journey, expand product offerings, expand product reach, expand product reach online and offline, offer more package sizes and pricing options, leverage promotions and other means to convert sales, and look for opportunities to win new customers from competitors.
Find New Space: Find incremental space (motivation, scenario, category, and service) that is suitable for your brand to extend to. Deliver meaningful and differentiated innovations, expand product reach, improve brand communication, and win growth in new spaces.
Kantar has identified three key behavioural traits that can help brand builders succeed: alignment, connectivity, and continuous optimization. In this report, Kantar will always emphasise the importance of these behavioural patterns for growth.
At a time when the population is growing and the economy is healthy, it will be relatively easy for brands to grow. But when economic growth slows and competition becomes fiercer, this can be difficult.
In this environment, brand builders should step up and take responsibility for guiding the brand forward: further building brand value by increasing brand differentiation and penetration.
Penetration refers to what percentage of buyers in a category choose a brand over a period of time. In the Brand Growth Blueprint, Kantar demonstrated that penetration is highly correlated with people's attitudes towards brands. That's the essence of brand equity, the emotional connection that a brand creates in consumers' minds that makes them more likely to decide to buy the brand. Kantar has also taken a step further by digging deeper into its own data assets to find out what is driving real, sustainable brand penetration growth.
Understanding brand equity is at the heart of growth planning. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and Kantar are part of the Future of Marketing Initiative. Saïd Business School, after analysing the latest Kantar BrandZ data, said that when investors are trying to find the best returns, brand equity is the last link they are looking for.
Kantar BrandZ research shows that strong brands grow faster, have higher profit margins and are better able to cope with economic uncertainty than mediocre brands. This conclusion applies equally to brick-and-mortar brands as well as algorithm-driven digital service brands.
The Brand Growth Blueprint is not only a theoretical framework, but also a practical guide for the world CMOs are charting the way forward。
Under the framework of the Brand Growth Blueprint, each brand has different growth paths due to its different environment and category. Kantar has developed a bespoke blueprint mindset for each brand, analysing the current situation and category, which can help diagnose where the brand is currently and identify key opportunities for future growth.