Essentials of Brand Research

What brand research do you need to build a healthy brand and keep it growing? This three-hour online course explains what brands are, what makes a brand healthy, the main tools for brand research, and the four most common types of brand research: market mapping, purpose and positioning, penetration, and brand health tracking.

The course is taught by Cynthia Portugal, Growth Director at Insight Platforms, who has more than 20 years’ experience in market research at agencies including GfK, TNS and Kantar, and on the client side at Unilever, EY and JDE. It costs £99, is available on demand, and is designed for beginners.

What you’ll learn about brand research

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Explain what a brand is and why brands matter to companies and consumers, including how strong brands can charge a price premium
• Define brand health and recognise the signs of a healthy brand: consistency, recognition, desirability, purchase and repeat purchase
• Choose the right brand research tool, from desk research and social listening to qualitative and survey research
• Use brand and market mapping to segment consumers and categories, size groups and find white spaces and sweet spots
• Research brand purpose and positioning with perceptual maps, brand association maps and brand archetypes
• Test a new positioning by measuring how a change, such as a sustainability commitment, would affect consumer preference
• Read brand penetration data from household panels: exclusive households, brand interactions, loyalty, frequency, switching, point of purchase and spend
• Turn penetration insights into shopper strategies such as family, single and variety packs, cross-selling and upselling
• Run and interpret a brand health tracker, using the brand health funnel, conversion between stages, attribute footprints and benchmarks

Who this course is for

• Newcomers to market research and insights roles
• Marketers and brand managers who commission or use brand research
• Client-side insights teams supporting brand strategy
• Agency researchers new to brand projects
• Shopper, trade and category teams who use panel data

What’s covered in the course

What brands are and why they matter

How brands are built from every element people see and experience, what branding means, and why brands are valuable to both companies and consumers.

What brand health is and how it helps brands grow

Why healthy brands grow faster, create iconic assets and command higher prices, with examples from global brand valuations and Brazil’s Nubank.

Tools for brand research

How desk research, social listening, qualitative research and survey research each contribute to understanding brands, with example outputs.

Brand and market mapping

How to segment people, categories and occasions to understand who buys or could buy your brand, what they need, and where the opportunities are.

Brand purpose and positioning research

The difference between brand purpose and positioning, the main types of positioning, and how to read perceptual maps, brand association maps and brand archetypes.

Brand penetration research

How household panel data shows penetration, loyalty, frequency, switching and spend, and how these insights shape pack formats and shopper strategy.

Brand health tracking

How to set up a tracker so waves stay comparable, how to read the brand health funnel, and how to use competitor comparisons, attributes and benchmarks to decide where to act.

About the instructor

Cynthia Portugal is Growth Director at Insight Platforms and runs a research, marketing and digital marketing consultancy in Brazil. She has more than 20 years’ experience in market research, at agencies including GfK, Research International, TNS and Kantar, and on the client side at Unilever and JDE.

About the Essentials of Research Series

The Essentials of Research Series is a set of on-demand courses from the Insight Platforms Academy covering the most important techniques and methods in market research. It is designed for people new to research and for anyone who needs to commission or use research.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the course cost?
Essentials of Brand Research costs £99 and is available on demand from the Insight Platforms Academy.

Do I need research experience to take this course?
No. It is a beginner-level course that starts with what brands are and why they matter, then explains the tools and types of brand research step by step.

How long is the course?
About two hours of on-demand video, which you can watch at your own pace.

What is brand research?
Brand research is the market research used to understand how people recognise, perceive and buy a brand. It covers the whole life of a brand, from finding opportunities and defining its positioning to measuring penetration and tracking brand health over time.

What is brand health?
Brand health is the sum of everything people think about a brand. Healthy brands have more loyal customers and advocates, create desire, and can often charge more than competitors.

What does a brand health funnel measure?
It measures awareness, consideration, trial or purchase, preference and loyalty, plus rejection. Comparing conversion between each stage, and against competitors, shows where a brand is losing people and what to fix first.

How do you keep a brand tracker comparable over time?
Run each wave at the same time of year, ask the same questions without changing the questionnaire, and survey the same type of people. If any of these change, results can’t be reliably compared.