What’s in a name?
What do you do when company growth actually threatens the solid reputation of your brand? This was the dilemma facing the client, a CPG company with national standing. The acquisition of two new brands would expand the company’s reach, presence and market share, but their names posed a threat – words in both brands had associations with historically problematic issues.
The client needed to know whether or not the negative connotations were strong enough to force a name change. They brought us on board to check the temperature of public opinion, and assess the current level of risk associated with these names.
Come at it from all angles
Assessing risk requires multiple methods to fully penetrate complex issues like the ones the client was facing. With risk, there’s a critical threshold at which perceptions shift significantly. If this threshold is crossed, consumers change behaviour and won’t buy the product. We needed to find out where we stood in relation to the threshold, so we attacked the problem using a number of approaches.
We had to understand all of the associations people made with the words today. First, we leveraged unstructured data, using digital intelligence to scrape social media accounts for a 12 month period to see what people were saying about the words, both when they were tethered to the brand, and used alone. This helped us uncover the existing levels of risk. Then, we conducted focus groups with shoppers and opinion leaders to test concepts and go deeper into various scenarios. All of this was bolstered by a quant survey, where we used narrative intelligence that combined open ends with AI follow ups to expand on consumer perceptions. This layered approach gave us a complete picture of how people felt about these trigger words.
In the clear… for now
What we found was crystal clear — the words didn’t pose a problem to the business. Yet.
The way they are used and perceived at the moment is neutral overall. While there were some latent negative themes connected to the words, these disappeared once the words were in the context of the brand names. When they appeared next to the brand, the response often evoked a positive nostalgia. Our research revealed that the strength of the brands are such that they almost make the trigger word meaningless.
However, there were signals that this might not always be the case, given changing contexts in the region. These two findings gave the client exactly what they needed to move forward.
A confident decision, and a clear direction
Based on the research, the clients decided to keep the brand names. While the findings affirmed what they had thought in terms of the minor risk associations, it revealed that they were low enough to not warrant a complete rebrand immediately. But they still wanted to plan for a scenario of increased risk, where they would gradually, and subtly, shift to a less triggering brand identity.
The depth of the research and the clarity of the findings gave the client confidence in their decision, and certainty around the path forward. It took the heat out of their dilemma. It also meant they dodged having to invest in new packaging and marketing of the renamed products. They got space to breathe, and moved from a place of panic to a place of strategic planning.
