Marketing Communications Research

Our product portfolio is designed to test the marketing campaign from strategy development and execution through to in market tracking.

Ideation

Concept Testing

Quantitatively test the effectiveness of your marketing message before you invest the time and money in creative development. Specifically, test the relative effectiveness of competing market positioning concepts and statements.

Creation

Communications Testing

Designed to diagnostically test the effectiveness of an execution in communicating a specific message and creating cognitive, emotional and behavioral responses across single and combined media.

Building brands has never been more difficult than it is today. Advertisers and agencies need to make critical creative and media decisions at a moment’s notice. Yet, most communications research is either too costly, too evasive, or too time consuming to give marketers the rich, actionable intelligence they need. Harris Interactive Marketing Communications Research (MCR) has designed a research based solution set that addresses these problems and goes one step farther—testing all media using a single platform. By embracing our proven online methodology, advertisers and agencies are finally able to make cross-media comparisons. Only when TV, radio, print, and interactive communications are tested and tracked on a single platform can you understand why certain creative executions perform better than others depending on the medium.

Discerning marketers know that the relationships between their brands and the consumers are sacred. Because marketing plays such a significant role in building those relationships, its success should be measured by how well communications connect with the consumer. We affectionately refer to this as Consumer Connection.

Harris Interactive’s MCR is the only market research provider that knows how, and on what levels these connections are made. This knowledge about how your communications work is the foundation for our testing and tracking system. The heart of our philosophy, consumer connection is measured on four distinct, yet subtle, levels.

Today advertisers and agencies use age-old tests that give marketing communications little more than a grade based on one, maybe two simple measures and little or no diagnostic ability. These scores rarely report on the communication’s intended outcome. Harris Interactive MCR empathises with these shortcomings and proposes a paradigm shift: measure the effectiveness of marketing communications, across all media, based on their express purpose.

Our point of view is based on the idea that no one communication is meant to be all things to all people; individual executions can work across any or all three elements of effectiveness. Each execution may have an individual, express purpose, making each unique combination of elements produce a different effect. Harris Interactive MCR analyses each execution relative to its express purpose. Our testing and tracking system gives a more comprehensive view of each execution’s effectiveness. It does this by providing multiple measures that assess critical elements such as branding, communications, and persuasion. As a result, marketers receive highly diagnostic, normative information used for making critical marketing and branding decisions.

We have designed an interrelated system that mirrors the communications lifecycle from ideation and creation through to confirmation. This system allows marketers to gain meaningful insight into their audiences—from strategy development to in market tracking. We understand that marketing is as much a science as it is an art. We feel the same is true about testing and tracking your marketing communications.

Confirmation

Designed for multimedia, integrated campaigns. The standard process survey has the following flow:

• Screening questions
• Brand equity questions
• Unaided and aided brand awareness
• Aided recognition (2 ads/respondent)
• Usage and purchase intent
• Aided awareness of your brand and competitor ads
• Copy point recall (i.e. functional awareness)
• Brand imagery (every 9th respondent)
• Limited number of custom questions