Tag Archives: Brand Strategy

Before the Advert.

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By Nadia Alexander-Khan
Alexander-Research UK

Nadia Alexander-Khan market research team working.

Better questions lead to better marketing.

Market research changes how you see everyday business. A shop window, a delivery promise and a customer review all become part of the same question, why would someone choose this brand?

One of the most useful things about market research is that the subject follows you throughout your life and career. You notice how a café presents its menu, why one shop feels welcoming and another feels difficult to navigate. How a beautifully photographed product can leave you reassured about what you are buying.

These small observations reveal something important, marketing begins long before an advert appears, seeing the decision behind the purchase. Researching marketing alongside building a business, gives a broader approach to solving problems, academic ideas help question any assumptions, business decisions make those questions practical.

It is easy to describe a product by its ingredients, features or price. Understanding the customer requires another step.

Someone buying a gift may be thinking about whether it will arrive on time, whether it feels appropriate and what it says about their relationship with the recipient. Someone booking a hotel may want reassurance about staying in a unfamiliar city and help planning their visit.

The purchase has a purpose beyond the product itself, recognising that purpose can make a message more useful and a service more thoughtful, attention needs somewhere to go, digital marketing makes attention visible. We can count views, clicks and reactions. That visibility can be valuable when positioned expertly and professionally, but it can also shape what we prioritise.

A post might attract interest while leaving basic questions unanswered, what does the product cost? Who is it suitable for? How quickly can it arrive?

When we look at a campaign now, we consider what happens after someone responds to it. Does the next step help them? Is the information clear? Does the experience support the promise that caught their attention?

These questions connect digital marketing with brand engagement. Every interaction gives a customer evidence about the business, trust is built in these ordinary moments, a delivery update, an accurate description or a helpful reply may receive less attention than a striking campaign, yet each can influence how someone feels about buying again.

This is where a brand’s ambition becomes a daily responsibility. If a business promises care, that care needs to appear in its processes. If it promises convenience, the customer should experience it when placing an order or resolving a problem.

For a growing business, that creates a useful discipline, make promises the team can support, then examine whether customers experience them as intended.

Bringing learning into practice

Market research gives us the opportunity to step back from the urgency of running a business and ask better questions. What are we assuming about our audience? Which parts of the experience create uncertainty? What evidence would help us make a better decision?

We are learning to treat marketing as a process of observation, decisions and improvement. Creativity matters and so does the work of understanding the person who experiences it.

The question we keep returning to is simple, have we given someone a clear reason to choose us and an experience that makes them glad they did?

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Why Good Marketing Starts Before the Marketing Department

The strongest brands are not built by communications alone. They are built into the customer experience.

By Nadia Alexander-Khan

How global connectivity is creating a seamless customer journey. © Picture House Media

Businesses often treat marketing as the final stage of the commercial process.  Develop the product. Set the price. Build the website. Then ask marketing to make people want it.

That order is increasingly difficult to sustain commercially.

Some of the most powerful marketing decisions happen long before an advertisement is written. They happen when a business decides what the customer will experience, what problem it will solve, how easily it can be bought, how it will arrive and crucially, what somebody will say about it afterwards.

Marketing, in other words, is not simply the promotion of a business.

It is the design of reasons to choose, as the customer sees one business

Internally, organisations have departments, customers, do not experience them that way.

A customer does not necessarily distinguish between marketing, operations, customer service, technology and logistics. A beautiful advertising campaign followed by a frustrating checkout is simply a frustrating brand.  The same applies in reverse.

A remarkably thoughtful delivery, an unexpectedly helpful employee or packaging somebody wants to photograph can communicate more about a company than an expensive advertising campaign.

This is where consumer behaviour becomes commercially important.  Businesses understandably concentrate on acquisition, How do we get another customer?

A better question is: What happens after we get them?

If the experience creates satisfaction, recommendation and repeat purchasing, marketing begins to compound. If it disappoints, the company continually has to pay to replace customers it failed to retain.

Distinctiveness matters

Digital commerce has made it easier to launch a business. It has also made businesses remarkably easy to imitate.  Competitors can see your prices, products, advertisements, social media and website within minutes.  That makes superficial differentiation fragile.

A stronger competitive advantage comes from building something recognisable across multiple points of contact, language, service, product, experience, visual identity and organisational behaviour.  The objective is not simply for consumers to recognise the logo.

It is for them to recognise the business without needing to see it.

Data explains what, People explain why.

Modern businesses have access to extraordinary amounts of information. We can measure clicks, conversion rates, abandoned baskets, repeat purchases and customer acquisition costs with increasing precision.  Those numbers are indispensable.  But a spreadsheet can tell us that somebody abandoned a purchase, it cannot always tell us why.

Was the price wrong? Did delivery feel expensive? Was there insufficient trust? Did the customer intend to return later? Did a competitor simply make the decision easier? Did we adequate Market Research.

That is why quantitative performance data becomes considerably more useful when combined with an understanding of human behaviour.

Numbers tell us what happened. People tell us why.

The strongest commercial decisions need both,

Marketing should create business value.  The temptation in digital marketing is to confuse activity with progress.  A company can publish every day, accumulate followers and generate millions of impressions without necessarily creating a stronger business.

The more useful measures are often less glamorous, customer retention, recommendation, consideration, conversion, lifetime value and profitability.

Marketing should ultimately make the business easier to choose, easier to remember and more difficult to replace.  That requires marketers to understand considerably more than advertising. They need to understand customers, operations, technology, finance, culture and the commercial model surrounding the product.

Perhaps that is the more useful way to think about the discipline.

Marketing does not begin when a business has something to sell.

Marketing begins when a business decides why anybody should care.

Beyond Utility: Why Consumers Buy Meaning

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Consumer Behaviour, Brand Value and the Psychology of Choice.

By Nadia Alexander-Khan
Market Research . Consumer Behaviour . Marketing Strategy
Founder Alexander Research

Consumer behaviour has long resisted purely functional explanations. A purchase may satisfy a practical need, but it can also communicate identity, aspiration, belonging and taste.

Belk’s influential work on the extended self showed how possessions can become intertwined with identity, while later research has examined how consumers use brands and products to signal both similarity and difference within social groups. These ideas remain highly relevant to contemporary marketing because they remind us that value is not created solely by product performance.

A technically excellent product can still fail to become desirable.

Conversely, consumers may attach considerable value to products that acquire cultural, emotional or symbolic significance beyond their functional use.

This distinction is particularly important in premium markets. When competing products perform similar tasks, differentiation often depends on less tangible questions:

What a brand represents, how ownership feels, which social meanings surround it and whether it fits the consumer’s perception of who they are or who they hope to become.

The implication for marketing is straightforward but often overlooked. 

Understanding what people buy is not the same as understanding why they choose it.

Demographic information can describe a market. Behavioural and psychological research can begin to explain it.

That difference matters increasingly in markets characterised by abundant choice, sophisticated digital targeting and rapidly changing cultural signals. More data does not automatically produce greater consumer understanding. The strategic advantage forms in knowing which questions deserve to be asked.

My continuing research considers these questions throughout consumer behaviour, market intelligence and brand strategy, with particular interest in how perceptions of value, identity and aspiration influence contemporary purchasing decisions.

The work forms part of an ongoing programme of research within Alexander Research.

Selected references

Belk, R.W. (1988) ‘Possessions and the Extended Self’, Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), pp. 139–168.

Berger, J. and Heath, C. (2007) ‘Where Consumers Diverge from Others: Identity Signaling and Product Domains’, Journal of Consumer Research, 34(2), pp. 121–134.

Sirgy, M.J. (1982) ‘Self-Concept in Consumer Behavior: A Critical Review’, Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), pp. 287–300.

Nadia Alexander-Khan -ORCID 0009-0003-7124-0829

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