Last month, Mike, Jon and Vicky took the Brand Health stand to the Ephmra conference in Barcelona. Together with the help of a band of mimes, the concepts of creation, realisation and validation were examined and explored to great effect. Now, we explore how our approach to market research translates into and can define these three distinct areas
Mike Owen 
Jon Chandler 
Vicky McLellan 
15 Jul, 2008
Creation, Realisation, Validation
Our brief to our mimes at the EphMRA conference was to bring to life the credo of interlocking Creation, Realisation and Validation.
The BHI credo is a brand focussed credo. As a company our focus is on building brands. We begin from a position of having contributed greatly over time to the theory and practice of branding and brand development. For three years now we have been adding to this body of knowledge through Third Tuesday.
Our whole approach is grounded in a deep understanding of how the human brain works, how it works within human culture and in turn how brands build and develop within these. This focus has lead us to constantly push and develop in terms of our research approaches and techniques, more significantly it has lead us to develop new analytic tools, models and processes that help unravel where we are, where we can go, how to go there and finally tell us when we have arrived.
Brand Creation is about finding or creating the idea space out of which we
can build and develop brand strategy. Finding this idea space through research
is about generating outputs that identify how needs, behaviour and ideas within
a given therapy area are enmeshed with one another and then identifying where
and how this might be taken somewhere new. Here we are often at the boundaries
of conventional wisdom and conventional research. This can often involve new
and different research approaches, more significantly it often involves posing
some very different questions of the research process itself, ultimately it
requires very different analytic approaches and models.
Brand Realisation is about achieving and building brand success by changing
the idea space. Changing the idea space is about identifying the words, the
images, the colours, tones, expressions, arguments, that can destabilise the
status quo and encourage its re-construction in a way that allows space for
our new brand. Bringing the brand to life and making it fly can involve research
approaches and questions that appear more familiar. More fundamentally Brand
Realisation needs strong analytic tools and disciplines to ensure that communications
have targeted the right elements the current idea space and are pushing it
in directions that work.
Brand Validation is about measuring changes in the idea space. It is about
identifying whether, where and how far communications have shifted thoughts
and feelings. Traditionally ‘measurement’ has been the most conventional and
‘rational’ part of the research package. Our approaches to Brand Validation
have sought to change this in a number of ways. Firstly our ethos is to treat
people as individuals; behaviours are reflective of a complex matrix of emotions
and attachments that people feel about certain subject matters. As such we
incorporate into our research many of the qualitative projective techniques
that our colleagues in the Creation and Realisation teams have developed over
the past 20 years or so. This enables us to gain greater understanding of what
really drives and motivates physicians. Secondly having pre-dominantly used
the internet as a research tool almost exclusively for the past 5 years we
are able to push the boundaries of online research to get the most out of it.
As such we are always looking at new, innovative ways of getting the most out
of quantitative research.
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