Understanding the role of brand in a highly competitive marketplace.

Situation

In the highly competitive discount retail marketplace, Target’s brand leadership sought to better understand the dimensions and value of the Target brand and how it performs with key audiences against several competitor groups. In addition, they wanted to gain insight into the Target brand’s financial strength and the effectiveness of the brand’s communications investment.

Solution

We employed our custom research tracking capabilities to understand perceptions of the Target brand and its competitors. Favorability attributes were also included to better understand the business drivers and brand personality. We surveyed customers, other discount shoppers, business decision makers and community leaders.

Our findings indicated that Target is a leader among its peers with strong Familiarity; however, Perception of Management is soft. Our recommendations included leveraging the brand’s strong Familiarity and overall reputation to maintain brand strength. To overcome weakness in Perception of Management, Target needs to demonstrate category leadership through its actions, and focus communications efforts to build and strengthen the “Perception of Management” attribute.

We also utilized our proprietary measurement models to understand the equity of the Target brand relative to peers and to assess the brand’s reputation against its communications spending. Our analysis indicated that Target’s brand equity is strong relative to its peers. Moreover, the model showed that Target is appropriately supporting its brand.