Matt Bowen is president of brandigo/north america, a global brand strategy and brand communications agency that specializes in brand development – with its own market and brand research. What exactly does this data-aware branding look like, what are the results of this brand research, and how can it support international brand strategies? In sps marketing's first podcast, ceo tamara grünzweil and peter thavonat, art director and teamlead atelier, join matt to get to the bottom of these questions and find some surprising answers.
Matt Bowen has been featured in the wall street journal, the prestigious american business publications inc. Magazine and fortune, and the business and marketing magazines cmo and entrepreneur. Matt holds a bs in marketing from indiana university and an mba from the university of surrey in the uk, and teaches brand strategy in master's degree programs. He knows what he is talking about!
Marketing strategies often do not lead to the desired results because they are not sufficiently attuned to the perceptions and needs of customers. Working with meaningful data in marketing is becoming increasingly important for success. At its Boston and Shanghai offices, global agency brandigo focuses on what customers really value and finds out what content is important to them in the decision-making process. In the best case, brands should consistently and with high impact address the points that are most important to their potential customers and help achieve their own goals. Knowing the state of the brand reveals the bigger picture:
"What customers perceive as important when buying a product, and consciously state when asked about it, often ends up not matching what is actually important when choosing a product or company. Research is a goldmine here, because we can use proven methods to find out what values really matter to customers,"
Matt explains. It's not about data-driven brand strategies, but data-aware branding. Because for Matt and his agency, data is just one aspect of marketing, to which other points such as emotional factors and creativity must be added. Relevance is created with the help of the values developed: why should people choose this brand over that one?
Without brand research, marketing can cost a frustrating amount of time and money, such as when marketing turns to brand awareness without prior persona research because the customer believes that to be the perceived problem. But believing is not knowing, Matt knows:
"Often brands don't have a brand awareness problem. The customer knows the brand very well, but still doesn't decide in favor of it or perceives it differently than the customer would like. Our brand research provides very precise information here."
And so, beyond marketing, the analysis results often yield relevant statements for other business areas of a company.
One of brandigo's practical examples shows how country-specific such analysis results can be: brand research for an international software company revealed that in Canada and France, the topic of innovation is of little interest to customers when making purchasing decisions because the wording may have negative connotations or be stale in terms of content. Customers in germany don't respond to the topic of innovation either – but because they assume and expect it in the product. Excitingly different reasons that ultimately lead to one result: it makes no sense in these countries, in contrast to america and great britain, to advertise a software with innovation, but better to emphasize other features.
Listen to our podcast – and learn even more from Matt: he introduces the proven persona research methodology brandigo works with and goes into detail about the complex research approach. International trends and differences between the u. S. , europe and asia are highlighted, and how data is used to develop successful brand strategy. And he explains why brandigo, founded by him in 1996 as a traditional marketing agency, chose this path in the first place.
