Media Industry

After having been acquired by one of the UK best known brands, our client wanted to assess the reactions of its customers and the market in general.

Specific business decisions needed to be addressed:

• Which branding solution should be used? A ‘house of brands’ approach or a ‘branded house’ instead, to leverage the strength of the acquiring brand and signal a new start?
• Which elements of the existing brand resonated most and had to be preserved?
• What was the fit between the new and the old brand?
• How credible were the new brand’s values within our client’s business area?
• How should the rebranding exercise be communicated, without risking alienating the customer base?
• Was the best solution to keep the existing brand, rebrand under the acquiring brand or rebrand as a totally new brand?

A multi-mode research programme involving qualitative and quantitative research and surveying all the key customer segments. The former used focus groups and in-depth interviews in different locations: we explored views and perceptions as well as needs. The latter telephone survey quantified users’ and prospects’ attitudes.

The research re-emphasised the strong bond between the existing brand and its customer base. It also identified benefits that customers and prospects were most likely to seek from the organisation following the merger.

Our client’s marketing department devised a communication strategy that reassured existing customers of the preservation of the positive heritage of the existing brand and emphasised new benefits that would most appeal.

This study was designed to help our client gain a thorough understanding of in-home entertainment need states and the role that TV plays in fulfilling them, deliver a robust segmentation model identifying TV viewing behaviour, and understand and quantify the segments to identify those with most potential for existing and future service models

We conducted the research via our online UK panel, delivering around 13,000 interviews, from both main household decision makers and influencers (including children). Strict quotas were set for pay TV, freeview, cable and terrestrial customers and lifestage to ensure a competitive market context.

Our unique propensity score weighting technique was used to accurately weight the data for both households and individuals. The segment solution was mapped back to internal databases for sophisticated above and below-the-line targeting. This was a critical study that has been driven by senior management and has led to sophisticated targeting of segments to increase future subscription.

Our client required a clear understanding of its competitive position in its core markets to track customer perception and react to dynamic changes. They were keen to implement an easy to understand, simple metric as well as having actionable diagnostics of the main factors driving their results.

We used an Advocacy Score approach, calculated on a monthly basis from over 6,000 online interviews. With this scale of robust interviewing it was possible to provide benchmark rankings for around 15 direct competitors in our client’s four core sectors.

The client has used the research to assess progress against KPIs and drive internal performance improvements using tracking data from more than 12 waves of research. The core metric has also been supplemented with more specific channel metrics, allowing a focus on competitive strengths and weaknesses.

In line with a rapidly changing UK music market and the increase in downloading and sharing music, our client wanted to explore the emerging shape of the new market to help it become a market leader.

It was important to benchmark the behaviour and attitudes of our client’s own customers against the UK general population over time. We placed a link to the survey on our client’s website to reach 1,000 users, and selected 2,000 nationally representative respondents from our online panel, each wave. We captured a range of respondent types from frequent downloaders of music to those who have never been involved in this activity.

There were many benefits gained from the research. It gave a new and interesting take on the market for use in online and offline editorial, as well as informed the content for a seminar. Sales teams were empowered with original information to share with clients and agencies, and a sales case for advertising digital music equipment and accessories was developed.

A need to monitor global performance for core customer service areas, based on specific customer feedback of particular interactions, namely in four service areas; customer training, product installation, helpdesk support and field support against internal performance targets.

With a truly global remit, the project covered more than 30 countries within Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

As an event driven programme, it was fundamental to develop an efficient sample management system to accurately process the high volumes of sample, to accommodate the rigorous and intricate validation processes, and deal with demands of conducting fast turnaround interviews within 3 days of the interaction date.

Fieldwork took place continuously based on monthly targets. Efficient telephone interviewing resulted in gaining feedback from more than 25,000 customers each year, many involving time poor senior ranking executives.

This programme delivered highly actionable results for a large group of key stakeholders.

Results were delivered to a very tight deadline in order to drive immediate action, consisting of daily, weekly and monthly reports and action lists. A custom build web reporting tool was also created to give stakeholders the ability to interrogate results for their own requirements.

In addition to providing feedback for each service area, the programme evolved to monitor performance at the individual customer agent and trainer level, with results accounting for a proportion of annual bonuses.