Analyzing and Application of Research in Brand Building

Introduction

This paper enlightens about the significance of brand and Brand Health Tracking (BHT) of internet service provider (ISP) business. It is irrefutable to say that a brand is defined as a combination of name, term, sign symbol that identifies the maker and seller of the product (Kotler et al. , 2018). Branding aims to determine a big and differentiated presence within the market that pulls and retains loyal customers (Businessdictionary. com, 2018). With more elaboration brand is not a tool to get target market but also a key to unlock the problems or need to sustain in long run. In strategic marketing plan brand act as a guide to understand business objective. In other words, the product or service carried out as expected? Was quality as good as promised or better? How one experienced the service? (The Balance Small Business, 2018). If the brand is easily recognised, that indicates masses are at ease purchasing your services and products. When deciding to introduce a brand to potential customer and what are the action needed to be taken to build strong bonding with customer which manager can look on several research tools, one of them is BHT-Brand Health Tracking (Brito, n. d. ). BHT is a marketing research methodology which depicts the attitudes of consumers towards a brand name product and how the memory of the brand competes with other brands. (Romaniuk 2013).

Business and Research Objective

One of the privately-held telecommunication company named as Lyca having headquarter in United Kingdom and other counties. Now Lyca want to grow worldwide. To fulfil this vision, they want strong brand name of Lyca in telecommunication network in Australia. The aim of doing this research by a company is to develop a strong place for them in the competitive market that is run by handful of providers. In Australia, the broad band market largely shares by three telecommunication company that is Telstra, Optus and Vodafone (Australia Telecom Market Analysis, 2014). Lyca want to become a good brand in long run market and want to increase the number of customers to give tough competition to these three companies. Moreover, it is Pivotal for business and manager to have a clear understanding of the market place of their brand in the present scenario with key component, to take the well-designed decisions about brand marketing. The main objective of this research is how the brand is coping in the present scenario to increases the sales by taking strategic decision. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of the decision will be evaluated by the aid of BHT for a successive time span like quarterly or every half of a year. Albeit, it is quite necessary to choose the correct dimension of brand health tracker to curtail down the ineffective market choice and excessive cost.

Information Required to Fulfil the Research Objective

For conducting a research on business growth, one need to do research by using a branding tool name as (BHT)Brand Health Tracking. Brand wellbeing is basically estimated by how successful your image is in helping you to accomplish your points (Lehmann et al. 2008). That viability can be estimated in various component, below shown in figure 1. [image: ]Figure 1: brand awareness, experience and image BHT and its component. This research was conducted through both interpretivist and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis by using tools for instance questionnaires and interviews which may be administered online through emails or websites, electronically or physically. There are lots of important factors which helped to make the brand name stronger and give competition to rivalry companies. Some of these factors/attributes were used in this paper to determine the place of the company in the market and how one can make strong bond with customers to give tough competition by making their brand name strong (Michaela, 2010). Basically, BHT tool is used to measure brand awareness, experience and image which has their own attributes figure 2: dimension of BHT tool (Ghaleno et al. , 2016) It is believed that brand tracking studies usually involve collecting quantitative data from consumers on a regular basis, usually on 6 months to 12 months.

Brand awareness is essential for the above process, since customers should be aware about the brand to use it (Grassl, 2000). Brand awareness is the first step of customers purchase by reaching consumers mind and encouraging them to develop a preference for their brand (keller,2003). In comparision to Lyca, Optus has a largest proportion of market customer on the basis of brand awareness. To save time and make the survey simple, there were two question for checking awareness in one questionnaire. The respondents had to rate both Lyca and Optus for every question on the basis of criteria that is top in mind, In mind, prompted and unaware through brand tracking model.

To make sure the question format is clear and understandable to the respondents for final data collection process, the questionnaire was pre-tested with 200 respondents. All the answers were measured on the basis of customers answer. According to the percentage of agreement and disagreement, each attributes were ranked. To analyze the collected data, partial least square (PLS) model using SmartPLS 2. 0 Software was used which focused on the dependent variable that is customer satisfaction (as cited in Gilles et al. , 2000). The Brand awareness of Lyca and Optus were plotted in a bar graph. This helped to do comparative analysis with the performance of both networks. It is believed that brand tracking studies usually involve collecting quantitative data from consumers on a regular basis, usually on 3 months to 6 months. The bar graph illustrate about the popularity brand of two different network Lyca and Optus.

The Optus brand is more famous than Lyca. The given graph clearly Optus is more favoured by customer in comparison to LycaThe output expected by the brand awareness is to look the place where Lyca stands in customer’s needs. Howe ver, it also provides the measures to encounter the problems. The major decisions taken under it is related to brand positioning, brand name selection, sponsorship and development. Although the brand name is already selected by Lyca remaining parts can help in making decision, strategies to mushroom the market customer. As a result intensify the brand loyalty(Van Rompay, Fransen & Borgelink, 2014). For conducting the brand research it is important to identify the consumers. lyca is used by how many people and who like the services of Lyca and who don’t. The target customers of the research lies from 18 to 45 years of masses who are user or non-user of Lyca. The identification of customer will aid to benefit the marketing efforts (Meenakshi and Krishnamoorthy, 2018). Next step is brand mission statement. The mission statement of lyca provides that it builds convenient strategies and plan to be used and is valued by the customers. It also make headway to serve their customers in better way,also help decision making processes.

The next information required is competitors of Lyca in industry such as Optus, Vodafone, NetComm Wireless, Queste Communication etc. They have established their brand name with the passage of time. The competitor brand gives the information about market. One can easily calculate the strength and weaknesss of their own as well as other competitors (En. wikipedia. org, 2018). Apart from it, intention and current experience also plays a vital role in networking industries. Intention give us a notion about the customer preference. To be more precise, the brand which satisfy the customer needs is proliferating in the market (Ezproxy. cdu. edu. au, 2018). Moreover, the latest search also vital to know the level of your brand. These criteria help company to make their company brand strong in relation to customer(Seyed et al. , 2007). The “brand pyramid” is a tool used to identify the customers place on the journey to loyalty. There are five key stage that customer go through with brand. First start with awareness and ends on loyalty shown in figure 5.

To be more precise, at the presence level, customers are not fully indulged with your services. They are indulge with you but not often. Further in the relevance level customer start think about what services they are given from the network company. Is it value of money by using the services? Next level is performance, customer start comparing the provided service to the other services in the market. In advantage, customer want to know the pros to use the same network or brand. Last is bonding, here customers have established a bond with the brand. They’ve determined that cost, advantage, and performance are all at levels that they’re happy with. By seeing the figure 4 one can say that Optus is the one who sharing largest ratio of the current telecommunication market in comparison to Lyca. By using BHT the Lycan mobile is making their bond strong with customer using five key of brand pyramid and six dimensions of BHT. The BHT tool helps the company to raise their market value to use others weakness as strength and the ways of improvement. It is clear from the figure 5 that after 4 quarters the brand image of Lyca raise in the market for four differ quarters on the basis of BHT. Overall it can be predicted that by the use of BHT tool Lyca has raise their market value.

Research Design in relation to the Brand Health Tracking tool

The purpose of research design is to get the output with the help of BHT tool. The purposed methodology needs to look in constrains and potential risk (Lewis, sunders and Thornhill,2007). The BHT result will play a crucial role in design strategies and investment. Thus, Reliable results are highly valued and the need to minimise the risk throughout the process. The research is divided in two phase interpretivist and quantitative. The qualitative research is depend on quality which we do not consider in telecommunication industry where as the quantitative ananlysis is depend on hypothetical research(Riillo, 2013). A positivist research method was employed to get the good results. The data is collected quantitative by structured methodology that enables imitation. As discussed above the brand performance by asking question as a part of survey (see figure 2). There are multifarious considerations that need to be focused while preparing and executing the survey (Quirks. com, 2018). The following discussion id about design, sample selection and survey delivery should be used to form a reliable survey methodology. The questionnaires were filled by the respondents who had bought the network of Lyca and Optus. For this quantitative research, a total of 200 respondents participated in the survey. The number of user and non-user respondents under the age from 18 to 45 is uneven, as it majority of the leading customers as the children less than 18 and the one who are above 45 are not using the network so often. Our framework was designed to best capture the essence of two customer groups – user and non-user. A user would have knowledge about the brand based on its current/past usage, whereas a non-user would have limited experience with the brand and the brand’s equity would largely be driven by perceptions (Quirks. com, 2018). Hence when modelling we need to separate the datasets for the two populations to avoid the pitfalls (Asya Archakova 2013). Another pitfall on research process is Accurateness. Researchers’ professionalism should focus on accurateness of quantitative data as these data can be influenced by manipulation and bias of the researcher. The participation of quantitative data collecting methodology proliferate when it is organized, summarized. Drawing conclusions about a research topic can help to get an idea about progress and success. This can help to identifying patterns and determining the magnitude of a research topic of interest also. We may face complex situation if a wider context is not provided. Thus, the survey should take into consideration while conducting research (Chevailer, R 2010). Further, survey taker might not take interest because of time in answering the questionnaires (Marketo Blog 2018). Therefore, the respondent was requested to ask short and relevant question on the basis of BHT tool component.

Furthermore, to allow better response to question, telephonic or email surveys are conducted as it is time saving and fast process (B2B International 2018). Moreover, Media is mirror to the world, by advertising in various networking site and platform, can generate more awareness of brand in the market. This can encourage engagement and gathering among customers and brand name (Marketo Blog 2018). Since, the collected data were in the form of line and graphical form, the data can be directly scanned into data software. Hence, there is less chance of data entry errors and this also saves the time and operating expenses.

Conclusion

Overall, it can be concluded that Brand and BHT play vital role in industry as it ultimately making the customer relation step by step using different analysis. The brand value in the mind of user is based on the basis of awareness and the loyality. Brand plays crucial role for creating brand image in the local market. While making brand the key dimension of brand pyramid and BHT tool plays essential role. With the help of survey and sample selection industry get the exact way to reach the mind of customer to give them the best deals and plan. BHT tool give information about the brand awareness, familiarity, experience and loyalty, the surveys which held every quarterly or a half of year, which ultimately help the Lyca company to plan their strategies and allure the customer in market highlight the need and demand of user and non-user so that retention rate for Optus may increase.