I have spent nearly two decades building my market research career.

During this journey, I have met many talented clients and colleagues from diverse seniorities and industries.

While I have enjoyed exchanging ideas and insights over the past two decades, I have noticed that some of these conversations tend to be quite similar.

What is the top question I have received over the years?

Is my _____ doing great?

(You can fill in the blank with words like “company”, “brand”, “product”, “campaign”, “ad”, “concept”, and so on.)

This question makes complete sense. Everyone wants to ensure that they are doing the right things when running their businesses.

Most of the time, market research and survey data play a critical role in the validation. To demonstrate that _____ is doing great based on survey data, we need a benchmark.

“Our brand is 8 points ahead of our competitor.”

“Our score has significantly improved this year.”

Benchmarking is essential.

But hold on.

What should we compare to?

I also hear other questions from my stakeholders, such as:

• What is the “industry norm”?
• How great is the market leader performing?

Professor Byron Sharp from The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has observed an intriguing phenomenon from consumer surveys. According to his book, How Brands Grow:

Consumers know and say more about brands they use more often, and they think little about brands they do not use. Therefore, because they have more users, larger brands always score higher in surveys that assess buyers’ attitudes to brands.

Professor Byron Sharp
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Now, imagine we are asking a typical consumer the following questions:

• Which sports brand is best for athletes?
• Which conditioner brand works best for your hair?
• Which courier service is the most reliable?

It is very likely that we will hear people mention market-leading brands instead of niche brands. (I won’t mention the brands. You tell me!)

Typical consumers are not professional marketers. Therefore, they tend to judge based on their familiarity with different brands. Their judgments typically favor brands that more people have purchased or used or those that invest more in marketing communications.

According to How Brands Grow, an exception is related to attributes that reflect clear functional aspects. For example, American brands are perceived as American, and expensive brands are expensive.

Therefore, what should a brand compare in response to the “Is my _____ doing great” question?

The first thing a brand should always do is compare itself to its past performance. For example:

• Can people recall my brand better over the past year?
• Do people prefer watching my latest TV commercial over our previous ones?
• Are more people starting to believe that my brand is trustworthy?

We should always feel happy when we see an improvement in our scores from consumer surveys.

Next, we should evaluate whether it makes sense to compare our score with other competitors or the market average (aka industry norm).

Here is my point of view.

If your industry is highly fragmented (meaning there are many industry players), and most players have comparable market shares, feel free to compare your brand’s performance with the market average.

Otherwise, don’t do it.

If you are running a smaller brand (that is, a brand with a smaller market share or fewer users), never compare your brand directly with the market leader. You are very likely to receive lower scores in consumer surveys. However, this does not mean your brand is performing poorly. Remember the phenomenon that Professor Byron Sharp mentions in his book.

What if your stakeholders (or your boss!) really need you to compare your brand with the market leader?

You should always examine the gap between your brand and the market leader. Are you closing the gap? For example, “we are closing our gap with the market leader, from 12 percentage points last year to 7 percentage points this year.”

Always focus on what your brand has accomplished over time, rather than how great the market leader is. Benchmarking with a brand that has a significantly different market size or user base is not a fair comparison at all.

Some personal reflections

As I write this article, I also have some personal reflections. I would like to share them here.

Last year, I became a partner at Intuit Research and opened a small office in Toronto.

This is a small company, and of course, I hope Intuit Research can become a major market research agency in Canada one day.

I work very hard.

Does it make sense to always compare my small agency with the huge one now? No!

What I should do right now is build my different client relationships and focus on my projects.

I seek gradual improvements, and I am pleased to see that I am making progress.

If you would like to discuss the topic of benchmarking further, let me know.

Vincent

I am Vincent Kwong, a seasoned consumer planner with 18 years of market research and business planning experience on both the agency and client sides. Currently, I am Director & Partner of Intuit Research, a research agency specializing in multi-country market research projects. Companies that I have served in my career include McDonald’s, Diageo, PepsiCo, Estee Lauder, Heineken, GSK, Pizza Hut and HSBC.

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