Amid the speed of change, life’s upheavals and its renormalization, brands need to know what's going on last week, not last year, to decide what to do next week and next year.
At YouGov, we interview thousands of people every single day through our own proprietary panel. The dashboards in our audience intelligence tool Profiles and our brand tracker BrandIndex are updated on a weekly basis to allow companies to keep pace with consumers and competitors.
This combination of interlocking measurement tools allows YouGov to build a picture of how different brands are perceived by the general public (or segments of it) from the time we begin tracking them up until as recently as yesterday.
Current and connected: Recency of information is critical
In a real-world example, our tools provide us the ability to track CeraVe's brand health over the last year. The skincare brand found success and a home on social media, particularly on TikTok where influencers lauded the brand for its ingredients, effectiveness and price point. CeraVe instantly became a social media cult favorite.
A look at BrandIndex data shows that, not only has CeraVe's brand health grown among the general population in 2021, but also that the brand tends to resonate higher among people who use TikTok. There are deeper insights to glean from this information; YouGov's ability to connect brand surveys to consumers' attitudes and behaviors sheds light on how frequently TikTok users engage with the platform, the types of user-generated content they like to watch and how they discover new content on the platform.
The speed of YouGov's research also extends to custom research with YouGov Direct, a self-service survey platform that allows brands and advertisers to tap into real consumer opinions in just minutes. For example, on the same day that Nintendo announced its new console, we were able to poll gamers on their excitement around the release of the new Nintendo Switch OLED.
"Often, harnessing and activating on the right insights comes down to doing it at the right moment, and for many brands the right moment is now,” says YouGov's Chief Revenue Officer, Americas Scott Horowitz. "With Direct, we've created a platform where brands can answer questions with exceptional speed while interlocking one of YouGov's core offerings of data connectedness. Pairing the speed of our surveys with the ability to provide context behind consumers' responses—like how they've been impacted by COVID-19 or how they spend their leisure time—is where brands can really gain a competitive advantage.”
Context: Helping brands stay close to consumers in an evolving market
We can learn a lot about what's important to people by looking at the brands that resonated with them in 2021.
In YouGov's U.S. Best Brand Rankings 2021, a list of brands that consumers perceive most positively, we see a consumer affinity toward names such as Band-Aid, Dawn, Clorox and Lowe's that enriched people's lives and health at home.
Perhaps more notable are the brands that have the most momentum going into the new year. YouGov analyzed the brands showing the greatest improvement to their index scores over the past 12 months to understand just how they managed to better their standing in the eyes of consumers.
At the top of this list is Pfizer, which doubled its score from last year by improving drastically across nearly every metric.
"With the exception of Amazon Prime Video, the 10 most improved brands in the U.S. helped consumers improve their health and wellbeing in some way—and what is encouraging for the marketplace is that these brands all managed to do so uniquely," Horowitz says. "The payoff was substantial for brands that got it right this year, and our data points to the exact qualities that drove consumers to these brands.”
Moving out of the pandemic, it will be more important than ever to have data that is current and connected, with the right insights to deliver context to match the scope of consumers' behaviors.
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