Brand-Building Series: How to perform an insightful landscape assessment

Many marketers dread the beginning of the planning cycle. Often they are still busy trying to execute current plans while facing the challenge of planning the next 12 to 18 months. However, although it is not as sexy as doing a TV shoot in Phuket, an insightful landscape assessment is one of the most important activities that a marketer can and should embrace.

Why should marketers conduct an insightful landscape analysis? There are three main reasons:

• To step back from your day-to-day job and shift your thinking
• To drive rigour and an external perspective into your understanding of what affects your brand’s performance
• To help you identify insights and make connections across internal and external factors that will help clarify your brand choices.

An effective approach when building a landscape assessment is to 'start wide', 'dig deep', and then 'stay tight' to help answer three critical questions: What is happening, why it is happening, and what it means.

Future installments in the monthly Brand Building Series will address topics including: What makes a good consumer insight Sources of growth for brands What purposeful brands have in common Principles for defining a successful strategic target Guidelines for defining a brand’s personality Difference between a positioning and a brief Tips on how to brief an agency Framework in evaluating campaign or creative ideas Dos and don’ts for giving agencies feedback

To 'start wide', marketers should do an analysis to understand the 5Cs (context, consumers, competitors, channels and company). Marketers should focus on no more than five observations for each one of the 5C’s, and can bring these observations to life with visuals, quotes, facts and figures.

Most importantly, make sure that these observations are crisp, so you can dig deep in the next phase.

There are several questions that can help marketers reach a wide understanding during this phase of the assessment:

• What are the major barriers/triggers to purchase?
• Is there a difference between the consumer and the shopper?
• How does this affect the brand?
• What do the brand’s awareness, trial and repeat metrics tell you about key opportunities?

Tip: Bookmark articles that you read throughout the year into a “5Cs” folder, so you have several insights to start from.

Once you have your five observations, the next step is to start to develop hypotheses and 'dig deep' in order to get below the surface and find root causes. Marketers must interpret all of the available data to get to the root cause and to get to insights on questions of who, what, when, where, how, why, why, why and 'so what?'.

For example, a footcare brand observed that category penetration had remained low for the previous few years. The root of the issue turned out to be that the majority of consumers who have foot conditions leave them untreated because they don’t understand the impact healthy feet have on overall health.

Finally, marketers have to 'get tight' to select the things that really matter. As Steve Jobs once said, “Simple can be harder than complex.” There are several issues or opportunities that will arise from the observations and root causes done in the previous step. So, to stay tight, you should plot all of those root causes into a pain/gain matrix.

Use this approach to prioritise what can give the brand the most return with the least amount of barrier. For example, developing a new packaging that will improve shelf presence may be prioritised over developing a new campaign to attract new users.

Now, take these steps and make the planning cycle more strategic, insightful, and fun.

Dorit Grueber is a director with EffectiveBrands, a global marketing consulting firm dedicated to unleashing global brand potential. Based in Singapore. Grueber has experience with Kraft, Sara Lee, Asia-Pacific Breweries, Jet Star Asia and Lexis-Nexis during her 20 years in marketing in Asia.