Is your brand top-of-mind with your target audiences?

Salesforce engaged our data scientists to research the brand experience of several solutions within the software company’s automated marketing product suite.

When it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce is a highly recognizable name. Yet, there were still a few surprises for our team when they reviewed the results of a 900-person target audience survey regarding Salesforce’s marketing solutions.

Most notably, we received 900 different answers from the respondents.
It became clear that the crowded marketing automation software field was causing brand recognition issues for the company. Although Salesforce.com had built a strong CRM brand, the target audience demonstrated little association between Salesforce products and marketing discipline.

Defining Recognition in Brand Experience

Recognition, one of the four key attributes factored into the LIFT Brand Experience Index, measures name recognition but also looks more deeply at the top-of-mind connections your target audience makes between your products and your industry.

This is critically important to brands, especially those operating in a crowded market. That’s because strong recognition helps your brand bypass the competition in the minds of your target audience. Instead of searching “marketing software” and sifting through thousands of results, Salesforce wants prospective customers to search Pardot, one of the product brands in its automated marketing product suite, so they can go directly to the Salesforce.com website to gather information.

When our data scientists are analyzing a brand’s recognition attribute within a BXi study, they’re checking to see how likely it is for a member of the target audience to name the client brand through unaided recall.

Recently, we conducted a sample Brand Experience Index in retail using household giants Walmart, Target, and Amazon. (We conduct mass market tests like this frequently to train our machine learning algorithms on brand health analysis.) In this particular sample assessment, more than half the population of shoppers named Walmart unaided when asked to name a retailer. Obviously, these are results every company in a competitive field would find desirable.

The Brand Experience Index for Salesforce identified key issues for the company’s marketing team to address. This provided valuable guidance to develop a concerted marketing, branding, and communications strategy that strongly focused on search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Using the Brand Experience Index as a diagnostic tool proves extremely helpful even when a company recognizes a general problem. Pinpointing the root causes or market nuances can be difficult in those cases. The Brand Health Score reveals those details.