Research services: Usage And Attitude (U&A)

We have a strong heritage of providing comprehensive online U&A research to clients and our bespoke online implicit testing provides cost-effective and robust behavioural and attitudinal research. Research may include brand perceptions, brand positioning, deviation analysis and brand mapping, demographic profiling, and statistical techniques such as cluster analysis.

The benefits of U&A research include:

• Provides you with an understanding of a demographic profile and attitudes to a brand within a certain consumer segment
• Allows you to understand how and where best to focus marketing activity
• Flexible offering can be scaled to your budget

Research objectives may include:

Brand:

• Measuring brand awareness, brand perceptions, brand associations and brand loyalty for brand x and competitor brands
• Understanding switching behaviour between brand x and competitor brands
• Investigating how people became aware of brand x and what led them to use or consider the product

Product:

• Measuring product usage and product frequency of a product and its competitor brands
• Understanding the occasions that prompt shopping and using a product in a particular category
• Exploring product preference and understand key motivations to purchase
• Understanding product experience when using certain products after the point of purchase

Attitudes:

• Measuring functional attitudes to brand x and its competitor brands
• Understanding the emotional attitudes to brand x and its competitor brands

Purchase:

• Measuring the who, where and how of the journey to purchase
• Understanding and exploring the influencers and influences on the decision to purchase (in-store and out-of-store)

Lifestyle Information:

• Measuring media consumption and key lifestyle information including marital status, number of children and socio-economic grading

Accompanied Shopping:

Usage & attitude studies can also help you to further understand the shopper journey in a particular product category through accompanied shopping. While the patterns, behaviours and attitudes to purchase can often be answered through online research, observational research in the form of accompanied shops, adds qualitative insight to research and further supports the findings from the U&A study.

All respondents are generally asked to shop for certain products and each shop may last approximately 30–40 minutes. Examples of discussions around the shopping include:

• Format: Initial impression of range on offer, positioning of product on shelf
• Decision making: Does the number of products appear confusing, is it clear what each product offers, are the product propositions clear to understand
• Influences: Does shelf layout influence products they interact with, does scenario in which they’re purchasing for influence behaviour, what sources of info influence purchase e.g. store display
• Product: Why do they purchase a particular product over others

Accompanied shops are recorded on audio recorders and on a HD video camera. The footage from this can then be used in the final debrief to give more colour and bring the presentation to life.

Segmentation:

We’re also able to offer additional segmentation/cluster analysis according to attitudes and need states following an online U&A study. Using customer data we can form clusters based on usage and attitudes. Defining customer types allows behavioural and attitudinal differences between customers to be exposed and creates a better understanding of customers and the relative importance of these sub-groups in market share. These segments can then be used to better target offers to these sub groups and to create more engaging marketing material.

Case Study:

Read about the Usage & Attitude study we conducted for NCP National Car Parks, where NCP wanted to know what people thought of their brand and how they decided where to park their cars.