Gradient Metrics

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Check out Gradient's private opinion research with non-partisan think tank Populace cited in @axios!

https://t.co/FQr6GQ2HJu

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

This week, one of our long-term partners used Gradient's research to do something cool: non-partisan think tank Populace released the Social Pressure Index, a report revealing that everyday Americans are self-censoring their opinions on a host of sensitive topics.

We believe the Social Pressure Index can change the way Americans view each other—and themselves. This is because the research method that we applied relies on contrasting private, deeply-held opinions against the stance that Americans declare publicly—and yields more common ground than you might think.

Some surprising good news: Privately, Americans agree on most issues. For two-thirds of the 64 painfully sensitive topics we evaluated, 90% of demographic groups hold the same majority view—hinting at the potential for some semblance of consensus.

You can find Populace’s full report linked below.
https://t.co/ykoPfNQjND

Got questions about private opinion research? You can reach out to us at https://t.co/Bp4JweDRht!

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

America has spoken—Gradient can reveal the 10 brands that get people out of bed in the morning and the 10 that no one would invite to an after-work happy hour.

Which brands do you think made each list? Lemme know your guesses and then feast your eyes on the truth!

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

How do you feel about your organization’s marketing strategy? Gradient’s partners have told me that being a CMO in 2024 is like navigating a daily minefield.

The culture changes constantly and quickly. It’s critical to know what your target audience expects—and what they won’t tolerate from a brand.

One wrong tweet. One wrong podcast appearance from your CEO. One wrong ad creative. One wrong media appearance… and your brand’s reputation can burn down immediately.

But this backlash effect is not unpredictable. You can get ahead of it – and you know how costly it can be if you don’t.

Modern brands know this, and you can be proactive in measuring how your audience feels about your brand, your sector, the world, and your role in it.

And brands don’t do this sporadically, it’s a concerted effort to continuously measure new trends and changes in their market’s attitudes and perceptions.

The world is changing faster than ever – your messaging from a year ago might be out of touch today.

Large brands that will win in this new world are tracking the equities that drive their buyers to actually want to purchase and comparing them across the sector.

It’s the surest way to get ahead of the changing norms and expectations around messaging.

The backlash effect isn’t random – it's a lack of information and data.

Have I convinced you that consumer backlash is avoidable? Let me know why or why not!

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Something I've learned from working with some cool brands is the self-fulfilling prophecy of consumer marketing:

If you're perceived as a market leader, you become one because you enter most people's consideration stage.

This tells me a lot. What does this tell you?

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Do you know why your consumers purchase your products or services?

There are so many large brands that have absolutely no idea why their consumers are buying from them.

Or even worse, they think consumers buy for XYZ reasons (and they focus all their messaging on it)... but they’re totally wrong.

Let’s say you work with an advertising agency to produce your next brand campaign.

There’s two ways they can go about things:

1 - They can draw from their intuition and pull from the zeitgeist to prepare an ad that they hope will resonate.

This is how you end up with beautiful campaigns that marketers love… but that end up falling flat and not really being effective in driving incremental impact.

OR…
2 - They could field a custom survey to a representative audience that would quantitatively narrow down the content, tone, attributes, and messages that are more likely to have a positive impact on the ad.
And then, that arms the creative agency with some parameters to work their creative magic within, rather than having to really totally guess and draw upon their intuition.

This is how modern brands can reduce some uncertainty and make hard decisions a little less hard to make.

Does this sound like an experience you’ve had before?

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

From Fortune 100 companies to some of the world’s largest philanthropy organizations.

They all face very difficult strategy questions that are worth millions of dollars and require objective clarity to answer them.

Here are some of the most common questions brands approach Gradient with:

At the very earliest stage, we help our clients answer questions like,

• Is there a demand for my product?

• What is the size of my potential market?

• If I were going to design a product, which features would be most preferable and have the highest willingness to pay?

A little further along their growth trajectory, those questions start to shift:

• What is the target audience I should be going after?

• What is the “willingness to pay” of that target audience?

• How price-sensitive is my core segment?

And brands that are even further along their growth come to us to answer questions like:

• How should I position myself to grow?

• How should I position myself to be different from the competitors in my sector?

• What are the attributes of my brand that are actually driving value so that we can project them into our marketing pipeline?

Across the board, the worst thing that can happen is that a very smart analysis is done… but it’s never seen.

To avoid this, we work backwards:

Before we start thinking about methodology, we sit with our clients and help them articulate the strategic objective they're trying to answer.

We will only move forward in collecting data and running an analysis until we're in alignment that the expected output is going to help our client win with the hard strategy decision they're trying to make.

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Brands will be investing millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad this weekend.

But will it be worth it?

Truth is, many of those brands won’t have a clue if their campaign worked or not.

As a brand strategy researcher, I hope those brand’s CMOs have asked themselves what they’re trying to get out of spending $7M on a 30 sec spot—and that they know how to measure its impact.

If I was working with them at Gradient, I’d highly recommend conducting a brand tracking study for both before and after the ad runs.

First, we’d survey a representative sample of the population (not current customers) and we’d get a baseline measure of awareness and perception of the brand.

Then, after the ad runs, we'd run a similar survey to another representative population – and measure its awareness and perception again:

Are people more cognizant of the brand’s name? Was it favorable? Was the ad sensitive? Was it taboo? What did people remember?

For a brand that's spending millions on one ad, I'd like to think at least two things would happen:

1- One, the level of the brand's awareness would go up. It's a pretty straightforward thing to measure, so long as you have a clean baseline to compare to.

2- The perception of the brand should evolve.

A Super Bowl ad should change the way people think about a brand and what they contribute to the world.

For this, Gradient would quantitatively measure the brand’s attributes that were portrayed in the ad and determine which of them had an impact on a viewer’s position in the sales funnel.

We could identify which attributes changed the likelihood of someone moving from only being aware of the brand to now considering purchase, or moving from consideration to actual purchase.

Do you think Super Bowl brands are actually setting themselves up to measure the impact of their ads—or is that something that gets put on the backburner?

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Every two weeks we put together a real-life story of how Gradient’s partners are using data to answer important growth strategy questions.

Catch the next issue at https://t.co/6fErGQWDta

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Brands used to have to understand cultural differences between countries.

But, in today’s world, that's just not enough.

There are now differences within each market that brands need to understand and adapt to—or risk making ineffective strategic decisions and receiving backlash.

Within the same market, brands are working with:

• Political differences
• Mindset differences
• Value differences

In 2023, if an organization is unaware of these in-market differences and tries to reach its audience as a monolithic unit, it’ll alienate sub-members of that segment and face backlash.

The way to win today is to understand each of those distinct values and mindsets within the market, and then design a segmented and personalized strategy to reach them.

We work with clients who have been around for decades, even a century. They’ve recognized things have changed, and they have to adapt.

A good example is how you recruit and retain talent.

Some members of the US labor force are drawn by value propositions around prestige and compensation. But that is not the entire workforce.

There's another segment of the exact same labor pool that is much more drawn to employers that can offer inclusion, work-life balance, and a family-friendly workplace.

These employees have the exact same skills, they want the same things eventually out of their career, but the messaging and positioning that's going to appeal to these two very different segments of the same labor pool have to be distinct.

And you’re missing out on great talent if you don’t understand these cultural differences.

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Every two weeks we put together a real-life story of how Gradient’s partners are using data to answer important growth strategy questions.

Catch the next issue at https://t.co/6fErGQWDta

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Brands used to have to understand cultural differences between countries, but in today's world, that's just not enough.

Yes, your audience will be different in the US vs the UK, or France, or Brazil, etc.

Is this the extent of your cultural understanding across markets? Then your brand will lag behind.

Modern brands that make strategic decisions with data know there are huge differences today that are relevant to them WITHIN a particular market.

This is essential for your brand to understand if they want to appeal to the distinct types of buyers that exist within a single country.

Even a relatively homogenous country where everyone speaks the same language has different types of buyers, different types of voters, different types of mindsets, motivations, concerns…

Now imagine how big and meaningful those differences become in the diverse countries scattered across the globe.

To win in today’s world, your brand needs to understand how those in-market differences will manifest and dictate the way your consumers buy, and how you can appeal to those motivations in ways that are relevant to each of your audience segments.

Now, let me ask you:

Have you seen the cultural and mindset differences within your country becoming more noticeable in the last few years? How so? And what country are you referring to?

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Every two weeks we put together a real-life story of how Gradient’s partners are using data to answer important growth strategy questions.

Catch the next issue at https://t.co/6fErGQW5DC

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Measuring brand awareness isn't just about your brand.

It's a competitive battleground where context is everything:

In the world of brand growth, awareness is just the tip of the iceberg.

A well-designed brand awareness study should always compare your metrics against your competitors.

It's not enough to know how well your brand is known – you need to understand how it stacks up in terms of consideration, purchase intent, and repeat purchase.

Sometimes, a brand with high awareness might struggle to convert that into actual consideration. Don't fall into the trap of emulating other popular brands without scrutinizing the actual performance.

A comprehensive, population-based survey is essential to get the full picture and surpass your competition.

Has your brand ever engaged in a population-based survey? What did you learn?

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Every two weeks we put together a real-life story of how Gradient’s partners are using data to answer important growth strategy questions.

Catch the next issue at https://t.co/6fErGQW5DC

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

When it comes to product design, it's not just about looks and features.

It's about understanding market appeal before making a costly commitment:

Many organizations think very carefully about the ideal design and features of their new or evolving products.

This is where techniques like conjoint or MaxDiff experiments come into play.

These methods quantify how much a real or hypothetical feature will appeal to an audience, serving as a cost-effective alternative to building a prototype.

By adopting this approach, companies can significantly reduce uncertainty and make informed decisions about product features before investing in development and market launch.

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Every two weeks we put together a real-life story of how Gradient’s partners are using data to answer important growth strategy questions.

Catch the next issue at https://t.co/6fErGQW5DC

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

Demographics alone won't reveal the true essence of your audience.

It's the unseen characteristics that hold the real key:

Understanding an audience goes far beyond basic demographics. As a brand, you must delve deeper into the fears, motivations, wants, mindsets, and values that define your audience.

In 2023, two people with identical demographics can have vastly different worldviews, so you must understand these unobservable characteristics to truly resonate and create an impact.

This is where utilizing tools like mindset segmentation comes into play, which offers a deeper, more nuanced understanding of diverse audience segments.

[Gradient Metrics @gradientmetrics]

At Gradient, we elevate survey design to an art form, blending data science with deep social science insights.

Understanding human psychology is crucial in creating surveys that accurately capture the desired information.

To us, creating good surveys is more than just using good questions; it's about how participants interact with the survey itself – from the layout and colors to fonts and buttons.

This meticulous attention to detail ensures that the collected data not only reflects accurate responses but also aligns perfectly with the statistical models used for analysis.