The missing step in marketing plans: brand diagnosis

Marketers who respect brand DNA gain an edge the rest of the market can’t replicate. Learn how brand diagnosis can galvanise your approach to market research 

One of the most frequently asked questions at Mark Ritson’s virtual open days is: which MiniMBA course is right for me? Marketing or Brand Management? If you’re already here in the MiniMBA orbit, the answer is often both.

The MiniMBA in Marketing is a complete marketing training in the fundamentals. It’s everything you need to build a 10/10 strategic marketing plan. You’ll do market research to understand the market and your brand’s position within it. You’ll build a strategy around segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP). And then you’ll execute the tactics of that plan via the marketing mix or 4Ps: product, pricing, promotions and place.

This is the right way to do marketing and this process alone will deliver great business results.  At a fundamental level, it’s how the biggest brands in the world organise their marketing cycle for success.

Where the MiniMBA in Brand Management diverges is that the course digs into the specific nuances of managing a brand, or ‘extra steps’ that brands take as part of their marketing planning and brand tracking.

It’s a full marketing training programme, but with dedicated modules on brand diagnosis, brand architecture and brand health tracking. It delivers much of the same content as the second year of a full MBA programme.

In this article, we look at Module 3: Brand Diagnosis to understand how this step can amplify your marketing plan. And why it’s not the same – but complementary to – market research and the ‘diagnosis’ portion of the MiniMBA in Marketing.

Market research AND brand diagnosis

Let’s start by clarifying that it’s not market research versus brand diagnosis. Mark Ritson swore an oath to bothism a long time ago and spends much of his time trying to stamp out the idea that marketers can do one thing and not another.

Brand diagnosis can’t replace market research – you must understand what’s going on in your market before you can craft any kind of meaningful, data-driven strategy. But it can give you a unique advantage.

The market is the market. Everyone, in theory, has access to the same information and broad opportunities. But by taking an introspective look at our own brand, we can find where those opportunities lie that only we are primed to exploit.

To understand how both sets of research work beautifully together, let’s look at The Ordinary’s recent Periodic Fable campaign. The dystopian parody takes aim at a gone-mad beauty industry saturated with pseudoscience buzzwords like ‘wrinkle erasing’ and ‘poreless’.

Could other skincare brands, analysing current consumer perceptions of the skincare market, reach the same strategic outline? Absolutely.

But none are so perfectly placed for this on-the-nose execution. As they say themselves, “It’s in our DNA.” The Ordinary launched in 2016 under a mission to simplify skincare science. And it’s a position they’ve occupied ever since.

When great brand diagnosis meets great market research, you get great campaigns like this.

A perfect diagnosis (in brief)

Functionally, brand diagnosis is the structured process of analysing what a brand is before deciding what it should do next. It’s market research, turned inward. As such, it shares the same three-ish stages.

In Module 3: Brand Diagnosis, Mark Ritson takes learners through his perfect diagnosis. This is a full and involved process, so the exact steps of your brand diagnosis will depend on how deep you want to go. But we’ve roughly outlined the overarching steps below:

• Step 1:  Discovery

Collect everything that already exists about the brand.

Mark suggests starting with the basics: location, heritage and founders. We are trying to understand where the brand came from, who created it and what it originally stood for.

Next, gather any kind of secondary data you can get your hands on. This could be anything from forgotten internal research and old strategy documents, to third-party data on the category or academic papers.

Don’t underestimate the power of a good old Google deep dive, says Mark. “I don’t just mean a token effort, I mean sit yourself down for three or four days and force yourself to do a hard Google grind into everything that’s been said about your brand.

“There is stuff out there about the brand that will be invaluable. I’ve never yet had a heavy Google session not reward a diagnosis.”

The goal here isn’t to find one perfect source or spark of inspiration. The goal is to triangulate all available data to build as complete a picture of the brand as you can, before moving onto qualitative and quantitative research.

• Step 2:  Qualitative exploration

We’re still in the discovery stage, but now we’re leaving behind the archives and heading out into the field. This is where we aim to expose the emotional threads running through discovery, by learning from real people’s experience of the brand.

You could do some ethnographic research, Mark says, but his best recommendation is to do some loyalist research. “Find people who love the brand, who buy far too much of the brand, who wouldn’t buy anything else, and learn from them.”

To round off qualitative discovery, recruit some focus groups representing different segments of the market. These conversations will help you get a sense of how different groups of consumers think about the brand and the competition.

• Step 3:  Quantitative testing and tracking

The final act of brand diagnosis is constructing a quantitative brand survey. This is where you will test perceptions, measure associations and quantify what you’ve discovered so far.

You are, simply, putting your learnings to the test.  And so it’s crucial that you keep your survey tight – you’re not hunting for any new insights here.

 “Remember,” says Mark, “All brands are different … so you can’t just create some generic questionnaire with 10 generic variables. You want to take the associations you discovered in the first part of the diagnosis and plug them into the survey so you can measure them.” 

keep your survey tight – you’re not hunting for any new insights here

Throughout the final part of the module, Mark demonstrates how to build an example 10-item questionnaire that’ll give you everything you need to diagnose a brand. “It’s the standard instrument I’ve been using with clients for many years to build a very simple, but extraordinarily powerful brand survey,” he says.

Mark explains how to construct and order survey questions in a way that enables you to later slice and dice your data in whichever way you might need. Done properly, brand survey data can be used to feed segmentation, brand awareness and perception analysis, competitor analysis, custom marketing funnels and more.

Your brand survey is also the starting point for brand tracking. Just by running the same survey annually, you can begin to measure where you’re improving and where you still need work.

Closing the loop

Most new businesses fail. If you’re working for one that hasn’t, chances are the founders were on to something. There is something in the DNA of your brand that cut through and resonated with consumers. Whether that was five years ago or fifty, brand diagnosis helps you pull that thread out.

Or as Mark Ritson puts it, “you can’t manage a brand without first understanding the specialness from doing a proper diagnosis.”

At the close of brand diagnosis, your quantitative brand survey gives that specialness statistical power. It reveals what consumers value most uniquely in your brand, so you can make “very clear and very important strategic decisions” on how to position and grow. 

your brand survey gives that specialness statistical power

For a deeper dive into brand diagnosis, join the next MiniMBA in Brand Management course. Mark Ritson will take you on a detailed walkthrough of the perfect diagnosis, including the blueprint for a punchy brand survey.

He’ll also dig into correlation coefficients to show how a simple analysis can answer the question of which data insights should (or shouldn’t) influence brand strategy.

The quotes from Mark Ritson in this article are taken from Module 3: Brand Diagnosis in the MiniMBA in Brand Management.

Cover: Andrey Kuzmin/ Adobe Stock