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Breaking Through the Clutter: 5 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Your Content

Consumers are inundated with content, messaging and ads each day. 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, 100 million photos and videos are uploaded daily on Instagram, and The New York Times publishes 65 blogs every day. According to an IBM Marketing Cloud study, 90 percent of the data on the internet has been created since 2016. In other words: the internet has no shortage of content and developing unique and insightful content that is appealing to your audience is more difficult than ever. Before hitting publish on your next blog, infographic or social media post, ask...

In Blog

If Not Online Reviews, Who Do Consumers Trust?

It’s a Love Story The history of online reviews is not unlike a love story. In knight’s armor, online reviews enter the scene on a white horse to save consumers from dishonest marketing and advertising by providing authentic reviews from real people. As the online reviews knight and his steed stand there in the majestic light of sunset (A.K.A. Amazon.com circa 1995), consumers stare in awe and fall madly in love at first sight. When this new information source and apparent transparency arrived, consumers proudly posted their status as “In a Relationship” with the online reviews knight, resulting in a huge wave of dedicated...

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Communications in the Age of COVID-19

Companies are navigating new ways of working and communicating during the COVID-19 crisis, as well as preparing for what lies ahead. It’s more important than ever to showcase support and thoughtfulness to customers while simultaneously demonstrating to employees their value to the organization. Here are a few tips we’re sharing to help clients with external and internal communications challenges related to this new and unfamiliar, fully virtual, economy: General Communication Guidelines: Offer Something Different. Your audience has been inundated with messages from seemingly every brand it has interacted with in the past. To break through the noise, offer a different perspective or unique...

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Big Data and the Futility of Ignoring the “Why”

Imagine that there are two gold miners: Swifty and Grace. Both are skilled mining managers and have dual degrees in engineering and mineralogy. Both are working mines that have been in operation for years. Over time, Swifty experiences a decline in his monthly yield of gold ore. Figuring that the actions he has taken for years have always worked, Swifty has his crews blast away ever more aggressively, with more equipment deployed over longer hours. Grace also experiences a similar decline in yield, but she takes a different tack. Instead of just doing more of the same, she assesses the situation. Grace...

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Why Cheap Marketing Research Leads to Expensive Mistakes

Let’s say that you’re a brand manager presenting research results to a room full of senior executives.  Which of the following situations would you rather face? You are explaining data results that you derived from a free online survey platform. You feel great. (What’s not to love? Management now has pages of data at their fingertips.)  Then suddenly, they start to question your methodological approach, inquire why you asked certain questions, and they start paging through the deck looking for insights and relevant recommendations.  Uh-oh – panic ensues as you grasp at straws attempting to validate your efforts.You have a team...

In Blog

Is Your Brand Tracker Old-Fashioned?

Checking the Pulse of Brand Trackers As marketing researchers we often ask questions like: “What brands do you think of when you think of tennis shoes?”  After all, according to canonical theories of brand marketing, we need to identify what brands come to mind when thinking about a particular category… don’t we? Typical brand trackers include measures such as unaided brand recall, brand preference, and brand associations, and those measures certainly serve a purpose. But isn’t it appetizing to think that brand trackers could provide much more? Perhaps even results that brand and marketing managers could actually act on? We thought so. So naturally, we...

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What If Everything You Ever Learned About Brand Marketing Was Wrong?

Here’s a distressing thought: New research might suggest that everything you ever learned about brand marketing was wrong. Okay, saying everything you learned is invalid might be an exaggeration, but there are several recent studies coming to light that suggest the old brand identity model popularized by David Aaker several years ago just doesn’t work in most product categories.  Yes, you read that right – new findings suggest that most of the advice first popularized in Aaker’s blockbuster book, Building Strong Brands, is fundamentally useless to marketing managers.  Moreover, these same findings suggest that the wisdom of “The Aaker Model” didn’t simply fade...

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Catch More Fraudulent Data with Advanced Approaches

For the past 20 years, the Internet has provided researchers with tools to quickly and efficiently obtain data for marketers. The monitoring of online data quality has been customarily taken on by professional researchers, who have used a variety of tactics to spot and remove bad data. Now, with the advent of easy-to-use survey software, some brands are beginning to bring their research in-house. This means that they have to shoulder the responsibility of identifying and removing bad data and dishonest responses—a critical responsibility they too often overlook. And they need to take on this task just as more and more dishonest respondents...

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From Rockets to Research: Brandware’s Tyler Sartin

Vice President Tyler Sartin is not your average researcher. He could just as easily help you go to space as he could help you develop a marketing strategy for your new product. As a leader on the Brandware research team, he helps manage projects across numerous sectors, including: financial services, packaged goods, pharmaceutical, building products and professional services, among others. An engineer by training, Tyler is well-versed in many technical disciplines related to IT solutions, data modeling, application programming and asset management. He earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Brandware...

In Blog

Five Tips for Engaging with the Media

At Brandware, we are in the business of storytelling and, as such, we never stop hunting for the next media opportunity. But, to tell the world about your client’s great story, you need to know how to pitch reporters effectively. Here are five tips on how to engage with the media to make sure your next scoop is picked up. 1. Personalize Personalize your pitches to the journalists you’re contacting. Make sure your story aligns with the beat they cover, and that the outlet is a good fit. 2. Be a Resource You obviously want to be a resource for the media on behalf...