Conquest Research

Tracking philosophy
We believe that much of contemporary brand tracking is based on an outmoded 20th-century model, in which the consumer always makes considered brand choices and advertising works through rational persuasion. All very neat, but mostly untrue.

The 21st-century paradigm is quite different.


Most of our decisions are unconscious
So much of our behaviour, and our response to advertising, is not thought through: it’s unconscious and intuitive. Consumers are bombarded with information, and there simply isn’t time to think through everything we do. A lot of our thinking about brands and advertising is not easily accessed via standard (conscious) questioning.


Brand response is more important than ad response
We worry too much about how consumers remember advertising. What’s important is the effect it has on the brand. So much of what we know about brands is learned implicitly, which means that often we know a lot about brands, but don’t necessarily know how or where we learned it. Standard tracking questions, such as recall, only take us so far in accessing the impact of advertising.


The most important brand response is emotional
Emotions power much of our brand choice. They are simple, unconscious and nonverbal responses – shortcuts, that help us to make choices in ever more crowded markets. Therefore, to fully understand a brand, tracking needs to access the emotional unconscious, where brand engagement takes place.


Distinctive features
Conquest’s Brand Health Monitor is based on the latest thinking about how brand communication works.


We go beyond recall
Because we believe that brand response is more important than advertising response, we go beyond the limitations of conscious recall. Recognition of advertising (via advertising prompts) is a much quicker, semi-automatic process, and our ability to recognise seems inexhaustible. Most importantly, recognition seems to invoke emotional memories from advertising, even before our conscious brain registers the fact.


Metaphorix™
Engagement with brands is mainly emotional. Brand emotions are simple, unconscious impulses towards behaviour, and, therefore, questions about brands and advertising should be designed to encourage an intuitive response. Our Metaphorix™ approach employs visual representations of primary metaphors to access consumers’ immediate emotional response – thus avoiding the overrationalisation inherent in traditional question formats, and providing a more direct route into emotion.


Drilling down to measure brand engagement
We use non-verbal, metaphoric scales to measure emotional engagement, alongside more conventional measures of rational brand consideration and preference. Drilling down uncovers the impact of advertising on brands by linking, through inference, an emotional or rational brand response with an advertising memory. This is not the same as asking people who recall advertising how they feel about the brand. Typically we infer the impact of a campaign on the brand by comparing brand response among those who recognise advertising vs those who have not seen it.


Measures:

• Advertising awareness
• Ad recognition*
• Brand engagement*
• Brand proximity
• Brand disposition*
• Brand feelings
• Ad engagement
• Ad empathy

Media	Track	Specialise
TV
Press
Radio
Cinema
Posters
Direct mail
Internet
Sponsorship