Introducing Brand Catalyst

Today we are pleased to announce the launch of Brand Catalyst, a revolutionary brand strategy and predictive segmentation tool. Built on the Simmons Insights platform, Brand Catalyst identifies the unique characteristics that differentiates over 8,000 brands. This new tool can help marketers define brand identity, differentiate against competitors, create unique personas, and drive effective media, creative, and partnership strategies.

With Brand Catalyst, you can create segments (using Simmons’ Smart Search technology) and compare and contrast up to three brand users or other personas, and dive deep into what defines and motivates these consumers. Brand Catalyst enables efficient consumer intelligence and automated brand strategy – to reduce the time marketers spend on creating data and maximizing the time they can spend analyzing data.

The first module in Brand Catalyst is called Explorer, which enables insights that highlight unique opportunities for customer retention, prospect acquisition, and category growth.

Setting up the personas is fast and easy. The Smart Search tool bar enables the user to select nearly any variable from within the Simmons National Consumer Study to build their targets. In addition, we’ve added a convenient way to slice the data – rolling up all users of a brand into the Brand Consumer – so the days of combining Most and Also coding manually are now past. In addition, by using predictive consumer segmentation, Brand Catalyst includes brand prospects (those more likely to become brand consumers) and brand non-prospects (a segment that is unlikely to become a consumer of that brand). All three of these, along with the usual brand measures, are available within Brand Catalyst and able to be used to build a persona.

Once the personas have been created, the rest of the data will populate the Explorer screen, providing an overview of your personas across a number of pre-selected Simmons variables. These variables have been sorted into different categories. First, you will see some profiling information about each of your personas, including their top indexing psychographic statements, level of consumer confidence, purchase propensity, and financial outlook.

Scrolling down, we can see the top 5 brands and media outlets, by index, for each of our personas. Categories and media types are identified by icons, and for each individual item, the index and the reach (or vertical percent) are shown. Scrolling further down, Explorer goes deeper into both brands and media, showing the top 10 for each persona.

Explorer also includes the top attitudes within each category for the personas. Here, the user has the ability to look at the default option (Any Agree) or use the slider at the top to look at any one of the 5 options on the Likert scale, plus the roll-ups for top and bottom two boxes. These highest indexing attitudes enable marketers to see the priorities for their personas, and what motivates them across a variety of categories.

Within Explorer, the last section is an overview of the demographics of each persona, with the highest indexing option within each category shown. As with the other data points within Explorer, there are icons to indicate each type of demographic variable, and for each, the index and reach enable marketers to get a quick snapshot of the brand persona.

Explorer is a fast, efficient, and top-level view of the user-created personas, using a series of predefined Simmons variables to give marketers a top-line overview of their various personas. But when you want to know more, that’s where the Reporter module in Brand Catalyst enters the picture.

The Brand Catalyst Reporter enables the user to take a deep dive across over 200,000 consumer attributes – and quickly assess how brands and their personas are different. Within Reporter, the data can be selected from the Simmons National Consumer Study dictionary. Once a point is selected, Reporter will show visually appealing and intuitive deep-dive reporting within the window – color-coded with the personas that are being compared.

The user can toggle back and forth between the index and the vertical percent, to explore the drivers behind the numbers.

With over 200,00 variables to look at, marketers can create multiple reports comparing and contrasting across media, psychographics, segmentations, brand purchase and intent behavior, and more.

The third (coming soon!) module within Brand Catalyst is Creator – a solution that enables automated clustering of a persona into segments, using underlying consumer psychographics. With Creator, marketer will be able to drill into different segments within their consumer (or prospect or other persona) to identify and test differentiated offerings and messaging.

To summarize, brand marketers and their agencies can use Brand Catalyst to:

• Create unique personas and messaging strategies that resonate with these personas.
• Build media strategies that identify the best media channels and properties to engage with those personas
• Develop partnership strategies that can help increase customer retention and acquisition, and
• Construct a comprehensive competitive strategy that highlights unique differences between their brand identity versus their competitors.

To learn more about Brand Catalyst, or to request a custom demo for your organization, contact us today!