Research methods: Benchmarking

We’ve collected results from hundreds of surveys across more than a decade of research projects and from a wide range of industries, capturing metrics such as brand awareness, consideration, and advertising recall.

Benchmarking can help to:

• Identify campaign effectiveness
• Place results in context of other campaigns we’ve tested
• Understand industry norms and averages
• Give perspective on metrics such as brand health
• Drill down into closely related methodologies to find out how uplift compares to your research results

At DRG we offer benchmarking as standard; it gives context to your research and can help give you a competitive edge. As a business we also have experience building custom benchmarking databases for clients.

The more focused your benchmarking is the more useful it’s likely to be. KPI’s allow you to measure performance and set targets based on previous performance data.

KPI’s include:

• Brand awareness (Spontaneous and Prompted)
• Ad awareness (Spontaneous and Prompted)
• Ad recall (TV, Out-of-home, Digital, Social media, Cinema, Press, Radio, Direct mail, In-store, VOD)
• Brand purchase
• Recommendation (0-10)
• Purchase consideration (1-10, 1-7, 1-5)
• Call-to-action

These metrics enable you to evaluate aspects such as campaign effectiveness through measuring campaign uplift for example. It’s also possible to look at where a brand sits amongst its competitors, for example in the top 60 percentile.

At DRG we have benchmarking experience across a wide variety of product categories including:

• Travel & Tourism
• Food & beverages
• Cosmetics & toiletries
• Medical
• Transport
• Telecommunications
• Financial services
• Charities
• Gambling & betting
• Public services
• TV
• Radio
• Technology
• Education
• Clothing

We’re also able to apply a number of filters to data including Age, Gender, SEG, Region, Medium, Brand type (New, Established), Methodology (Online, Face-to-Face, CATI, postal), Sample type (Test, Control), and Research Stage (Pre, Mid, Post).