Kantar launches Blueprint for Brand Growth

Data and insights company Kantar has launched Blueprint for Brand Growth – a new “essential recipe” to help businesses expand.

The blueprint – launched globally on Tuesday at 8.30pm (9.30am UK time) – brings Kantar’s vast databases of customer attitudinal and behavioural information together, showing where companies need to focus their efforts.

The blueprint demonstrates that brands grow by being meaningfully different to more people, which brands can achieve by predisposing more people to your brand, being more present, and finding new spaces to grow into.

“This sounds deceptively simple,” David Thomas, Kantar New Zealand’s Chief Commercial Officer, Insights Division, tells StopPress ahead of the launch.

“But of course what this blueprint means for brands differs based on their context, competitive situation, and size.”

This means each company that uses the blueprint will arrive at a different solution, Thomas says.

“This isn’t just about ‘brand’ – the answer can be any of the ‘4Ps’ and so may cover the offer, pricing, customer experience, creative and media strategy, as well as developing brand equity,” he says.

“There is no one answer, but the blueprint provides the necessary guidance to enable brands to focus on the key things they should be doing – with the confidence to act, because we’ve validated all aspects.”

Billions of data points

Worldwide, Kantar is the largest insights company with the largest database of customer attitudinal and behavioural data in the world – across virtually every category, market, customer type, and brand size – so it is uniquely placed to explain how marketing plays out in the real world.

Because Kantar has collected so much information, it’s able to bridge the gap between what people say they’ll do and their actual behaviour, says Thomas.

“Other people tend to have behavioural (shopper actual purchase data) or attitudinal (research-driven) data. We have both at massive scale,” he says.

“So billions of data points – 6.5 billion, in fact – which means that we can map what people say they’re thinking about to what they actually do.

“What that means is we can use that data to validate what we’re saying about how marketing works. It means we can say, ‘You should be doing x.’

“And we can say, ‘Here’s the proof, and you’ll grow four times as fast if you do x.’”

Meaningfully different

The key to how the blueprint works is in the phrase “meaningfully different”, Thomas explains.

“There is one train of thought in the marketing world that all you’ve got to do is tell people about your brand. So drive salience, awareness, mental availability.

“And we at Kantar say, actually, according to our data, that explains about 40 percent of brand predisposition. Which leaves 60 percent. And our data says that what we term ‘meaningful difference’ explains the rest of it [the 60 percent].

“Meaningfulness is providing something that is meaningful and relevant to a consumer – at both a functional and an emotive or an affinity lens: you’re getting what you need and you’re feeling good about it. As well as the different part, where you’re saying that your brand is unique, it’s setting trends, it’s got momentum. So what you’re getting from that product or service is different to what other brands are giving you.

“Put those things together – meaningfully different – and with the salient part, the awareness and availability part, you’ve got the drivers of brand growth.”

The blueprint took over a year to formulate, but it’s backed up by 25 years’ worth of data and IP. It’s “quite exciting”, says Thomas.

“To put it in a very simple, one-page coherent form that we can talk to any form of marketer about is certainly a first for us. And a first for anybody with this degree of sophistication and validation.”

Introducing the blueprint, Jane Ostler, Kantar’s EVP of Thought Leadership and Blueprint project lead, says, “Our Blueprint for Brand Growth sets a new standard for strategic marketing understanding and excellence.

“Every marketing leader can use this framework to evaluate their brand’s own competitive positioning and then shape their strategic response and marketing investment priorities.”

The blueprint

To achieve meaningful difference, the three Growth Accelerators and decision-making frameworks Kantar recommends marketers activate are:

• Predispose more people: Creativity, advertising and experience builds meaningful difference as well as mental availability for your brand. When optimally executed, this drives 9x higher volume share, 2x higher average selling price, and a 4x likelihood of growing share in the future.
• Be more present: Optimising distribution, customer journey, range, pack, pricing and promotions wins 7x more buyers vs those present in only half of buying occasions.
• Find new space: Innovation focused on identifying incremental spaces (motivations, occasions, tangential categories and services) doubles a brand’s chance of growth. Increasing the number of usage occasions by 10 percent results in revenue growth of +17 percent.

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