Hidden brand worlds

With emotional brand loading (ebl), the emotional strength of the brand becomes measurable

THE CHALLENGE

Following a merger, Bremer Nordmilch AG had some 30 brands to manage. The German market leader, with 4.5 billion litres of milk processed each year, decided to undergo a fundamental examination and re-working of its brand strategy.
 
Positioned as a national umbrella brand, Milram should expand and open itself to new market segments. Under this umbrella, the various sub-brands, such as Frühlingsquark, Burlander or Vitality should be able to develop their own targeted markets.
 
Which position is still available?
Preliminary analyses indicated that the Milram umbrella brand stands for values such as reliability, expertise and high quality, but in contrast to its sub-brands, lacks emotional loading. This meant that an emotional positioning niche had to be found.

THE SOLUTION
 
Nordmilch decided to undergo nextpractice's innovative emotional brand loading (ebl) procedure. This is a specific adaptation of the nextexpertizer interview and analysis tool.
 
New directions in brand analysis
Nordmilch marketing director Ernst-Günther Jörn describes the decision to implement ebl: "We wanted to make use of a market-analysis instrument that, unlike traditional image evaluations, doesn't scale but rather highlights and includes real-life situations and reasons for decision-making."
 
Qualitative surveys - quantifiable and representative results
The special thing about it: ebl does not dictate terms of characterisation. Rather, the interviewees have the opportunity to create their own brand world, individually, intuitively and in their own words. The technique allows quantification of qualitative, emotional attitudes. Soft factors become the explicit basis for decision making. The complexity of the aspects linked to the brand by those interviewed is illustrated by the evaluation of the interviews in a unique multi-dimensional form: the emotional space.
 
The investigation not only clarified Milram's position in relation to competitive brands and products in the dairy sector, it also discovered emotional niches in the market for future brand management and advertising strategies.

THE RESULTS 

The interviews underline Milram's known brand properties while revealing deficits in the realization of emotional factors. 

Emotional strengths-and-weaknesses profile
The consumers named attributes such as "low-key", "conservative" and "been there before". They described the strengths with words such as "sensual", "pleasant", "enjoyable", "soft and flowing". Milram still proved to be relatively bland, but rich in potential for opening up new fields. The examination provided a host of valuable information for the advertising and PR agency. It went far beyond the development of a pure umbrella-brand strategy. Amongst the individual competitive brands, it was possible to detect distinctly different complementary profiles with pronounced emotional loading. The results presented the advertising strategists with new challenges. 

Implementation in the advertising strategy
Nordmilch quickly turned the results of the ebl investigation into definite action. A gap was detected the area "feel good". "We created the slogan ´Milram...essen für´s ich´ ('food for me') which conveys every meaning associated with the idea of "feel good", such as 'tastes good', 'good for you' and 'healthy'", explains Nordmilch marketing director Ernst-Günther Jörn.