Improving brand imagery to win market share in a slow-growing category

By simulating the impact of different changes in brand imagery, our telecoms client was able to develop a cost-effective strategy to strengthen their brand positioning and increase sales.

Challenge

Telecoms is a highly competitive category and the overall market growth is minimal. With sales leakage to aggressive competitors, our client struggled to improve their sales with product upgrades from existing customers – considered an easy win in the sector.

Our client’s brand guidance system showed unchanged brand image scores, and highlighted that they were in danger of becoming less ‘meaningful’ to their target audience. Furthermore, their brand tracking data indicated that the brand was decreasingly being considered as the first choice for customers.

So how could our client dial up their relevance, meet their customers’ needs again, and increase their sales?

Approach

We deployed our mind to sales simulator tool to simulate the impact of change in brand imagery on our client’s brand positioning, brand equity and sales.

A number of different scenarios were explored, in which we were able to evaluate how our client’s brand would perform against measures that indicate how meaningful, different and salient the brand is compared to competitors, and the impact of these on ‘brand power’ – a key metric that indicates how strong the brand is. A leap in ‘brand power’ would boost sales, but we needed to find the best way for our client to achieve this.

Insight

Our client had been considering a complete change of brand image to try and win back market share. Straight away, the testing highlighted the risks of this; the simulator revealed that a revamped brand strategy with a novel imagery emphasis would alienate their existing clientele and have a potentially negative impact brand growth.

Instead, we saw that bringing in an aspect of innovation would significantly and positively impact the rest of their brand imagery set, make the brand more ‘meaningful’ and strengthen their positioning overall.

We were also able to identify that ‘trust’ the most critical driver for brand positioning, with ‘service’, ‘product’ and ‘reputation’ lagging behind it. We were then able to see how dialling up ‘trust’ in their messaging would positively impact their positioning, brand equity, and ultimately, sales.

Impact

At such a critical time, before carrying out the simulator tests, our client had been gearing up to pull the plug on a ‘failing’ strategy and potentially implement a new strategy that would have had a negative impact on the brand and sales.

With the intricate analysis and many simulated scenarios, we were able to pinpoint a more cautious, and cost-effective tactical fix to their strategy. By dialling up ‘trust’ in their messaging, and focusing more on brand innovation, our client has been able to proceed with confidence, knowing they have made the right decisions to increase sales and deliver brand growth.

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