Pi-Consulting

Many advertisers invest in market research studies that focus on their own brands and/or the market segments in which they compete. This kind of study goes into detailed areas that general-purpose studies can rarely attempt; for instance brand penetration, weight of usage, brand preference, advertising recall, usage and attitude, competitive migration patterns etc.
Much of this knowledge is indispensable to those responsible for a brand’s marketing activity. It also has the benefit of being quantifiable, since quantitative data on purchase and usership can be related to known market sales or consumption patterns via volumetric measures.
Many usage and attitude studies are more about usage than attitude. If questionnaires are constructed sensitively, the attitudinal data gathered from U&A studies can often give penetrating insights into a consumer group’s innate values and attitudes, at least where they relate to the product itself. However, users of such attitude data have to recognize the unavoidable limitation that the consumer’s mindset is only being measured in the context of the product sector concerned. There is no reference or contextualization in terms of society as a whole or the overall market. The attitudes of diet soft drink consumers, for instance, are only being measured in terms of the attitudes of other diet soft drink consumers, or at best the attitudes of soft drink consumers in general. This makes much of the data gathered in this way self-referential. It can be hard to “see outside the box”. Narrow context is the main limiting factor on brand- or market-focused studies.