Brand perception
Brand perception research finds out what a brand means to people. People often struggle to say it but can usually show you, so Qualzy uses mood boards, positioning maps and in-the-moment posts to bring out the associations and feelings direct questions rarely reach, with the reasoning behind every one.
Most brand studies touch all three, and plenty go somewhere else entirely. Where you start depends on the question the business is asking.
Ask people to build a picture of how they see a brand: its values, its personality, its place in their lives. Projective tasks, such as a day in the life of the brand as a person, reach implicit attitudes that rational self-report misses.
Place brands on a matrix, such as trusted to risky or warm to cold, or rate them on the attributes that matter. You see where each brand sits in people's minds, where the white space is and where a competitor is vulnerable.
What people say about a brand and how it shows up in their lives aren't always the same. Ask them to post when they notice it, use it or choose something else instead, and you see the brand as it's actually lived.
Ask people what a brand stands for and you'll hear its advertising played back. Projective tasks give them another way in, and because everyone answers on their own, every answer is their own.
If the brand walked into the room, who would it be? What are they wearing, and who are they talking to?
Shows you personality, status and warmth, in terms people find easy to describe.
Every brand in the category is at the same party. Who's hosting, who's stuck in the kitchen and who left early?
Shows you where each brand sits next to the others, and why.
The brand has closed down. Write its obituary. What will people miss, and what won't they?
Shows you what's genuinely distinctive, and what's at risk.
Make a board of how the brand makes you feel, then one for its closest competitor.
Shows you the emotional territory, built in a Personal Canvas.
People build a mood board, a brand personality collage or a positioning map, adding images from their own device or a built-in image search, plus text and drawing. Every element is labelled and explained, so you get the image and the story behind it. Set it up free-form, or as a matrix or quadrant that guides the expression without constraining it.
Ask people to group brands, or brand attributes, the way they'd naturally put them together. It shows which brands they see as alike, and the categories they'd create themselves.
Rate a set of brands on innovation, trust, value, quality or any attribute you choose, with reasoning after each scale. Pick any two attributes and every brand is plotted on a two-axis map.
Text, photos, video and voice notes in one response, posted from the moment the brand turns up: on the shelf, in an ad, at the point of choosing something else. Comments and replies can be switched on, so people build on each other's views.
Mood boards and positioning boards work as well online as they do in a focus group room, and everyone completes their own.
Run a short Qualzy Discussion for a single brand study, or track how perceptions shift over months in a Qualzy Community.
Reach people across a whole country without the travel, or run each market as its own project at the same time, in any of 30+ languages. More on global research.
No. They can use photos from their own device or camera, or pick from a built-in image search powered by Pixabay and Unsplash, without leaving the activity.
Yes. Card Score rates every brand on the attributes you choose and can plot any two of them against each other. Card Sort shows which brands people group together.
Yes. Run the same tasks in waves in a Qualzy Community, with the same people coming back, and compare how their views change.
Yes. Send us your discussion guide and our team builds the project, and we'll flag anything in the guide that might trip participants up before it goes live.
Yes. Upload logos, ads, packs or competitor material into a Card Score, Card Sort or Pin Task, so people react to the real thing.
The brand, its competitors and what you need to understand. We’ll talk through which tasks would get you there.
