GfK Healthcare, the largest provider of fully integrated custom health care marketing research in the United States, announced today the launch of Brand BEAT™ (Brand Equity Assessment & Tracking), a complete package of health care-specific brand positioning diagnostic tools for measuring the cognitive and emotional strengths of a brand.
Grounded in the latest branding theories and structured with today’s cost efficiencies in mind, Brand BEAT differs from other brand tracking tools in that it offers product managers a modular approach with the ability to measure and monitor a brand’s health along a variety of dimensions. This flexibility to evaluate a brand’s strength along targeted metrics represents a more cost- and time-efficient approach to getting exactly the data clients need to shape effective strategies and optimize brand messaging for any given competitive challenge.
The core of GfK Healthcare’s Brand BEAT is the Brand Equity Assessment, which offers a holistic evaluation of brand equity by calculating “brand cognition” (rational and logical elements) together with “brand heart” (emotional elements). This exercise serves as a reliable predictor of physicians’ future prescribing intentions and behavior. Brand BEAT combines the standardized evaluation of brand equity with customized modules (therapeutic area-specific, based on treatment practices, habits and experiences), standardized analytics and normative benchmarks to allow for comparisons against other brands.
Other diagnostic criteria applied through the Brand BEAT process to assess a brand’s strength include Brand Awareness (What level of awareness do physicians have of Brand X?); Brand Performance (How is the performance of Brand X viewed in its competitive context?); Brand Personality (Does the target group see Brand X as intended?); and Brand Message Alignment (Do Brand X’s messages convey the promises as intended?).
Other modules within the Brand BEAT assessment include the Brand Attrition Funnel, which provides insight into a brand’s strengths and weaknesses and includes metrics such as a brand’s presence (awareness levels), consideration, trial (conversion), prescription volume (share) and loyalty/bonding, and Brand Driver Analysis, which determines precisely what is driving a brand’s market share.
“With all the flexible options that Brand BEAT offers, a brand’s strength can be assessed at any given stage throughout the product life cycle and within any scope of a particular market’s competitive dynamics,” said Jeff Cartwright-Smith, Ph.D., senior vice president of marketing science, GfK Healthcare. “More traditional approaches to brand equity assessment and tracking are limited in that they commonly offer a single comprehensive approach that is not adaptable or amenable to meeting a client’s specific challenge at a given moment. Brand BEAT can be implemented as a full diagnostic analysis every one to two years, or selected brand equity assessment modules can be included as an add-on to an ATU.”
“As a further advantage of our offering, while other brand assessment exercises seek to measure physicians’ emotions, which could be deemed as artificial and thus impact the validity of the results, Brand BEAT measures the brand’s ‘personality.’ This approach allows physicians to choose from a large pool of possible associations to describe the brand. Thus it is the brand’s ‘personality,’ not the respondent’s, being assessed,” said Cartwright-Smith.
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