The fact that brands have become more important in the 21st-century marketplace should not come as a surprise to brand managers or CMOs. What often does come as a surprise is that today's consumers no longer behave the way they "say" they will. Why? Because the brand engagement, bonding, and loyalty process is more emotional than rational, a change from years past.

Brand Lounge acts as the regional partner to Brand Keys, Inc. the only research consultancy that specializes in customer loyalty and engagement, providing brand equity metrics that accurately predict future, in-market consumer behavior that correlates with sales and profitability.

Our approach uncovers and quantifies both the rational and the emotional motivations behind consumers' decisions in every category.

And, by understanding what motivates loyalty and engagement, you will be able to:

• Identify and anticipate unmet needs and expectations,
• Quantify your brand's 'Customer Loyalty Gap' – the difference between what consumers "say" they want, and what actually drives their behavior, and
• Measure Return-On-Investment of all media and marketing initiatives – in advance of spend!

We regard brand insight and research to be paramount to everything we do. It is vital for creating a brand strategy that is absolutely correct and connects with your target audience. Our workshops are designed to help clients define their competitive strengths, identifying the true drivers of your brand value in order to maximize brand equity. By brand equity we mean the ability for your brand to attract new customers and retain existing customers and vice versa, depending on the brand's lifecycle. High equity brands are those that attract more customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Measuring Marketing spending Efficiency and Effectiveness in relation to all components of a marketing plan

Most corporate initiatives cannot be properly assessed until sales and profit results are analyzed. This often means a lag of anywhere from a couple of quarters to a year or more before it is possible to assess an initiative's return on investment — by which time it may be too late to reverse an unacceptably low ROI.

One of the great benefits of the Brand Keys methodology is that our measures correlate directly to sales in the marketplace. This gives our clients a non-transactional — and much faster — way to answer such questions as "What am I getting for my advertising, marketing and public-relations dollars?" or "Are the new products (or services or features) succeeding in the marketplace?" or "Should we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to introduce a new burger for adults?"
The classic indicator of a corporation's financial health is its price-to-earnings ratio, as calculated by the formula:

A similar logic yields the ROI of any corporate initiative. We start by measuring brand equity (the relationship between your brand's loyalty-driver curve and the Ideal curve) before and after customers are exposed to the initiative. Then, by dividing the "after" measure with the "before" measure, we obtain a precise quantitative measure of the initiative's ROI (which we call the Brand Multiple):

The Brand Multiple can be calculated within weeks of an initiative's launch; it can even be calculated before an initiative's launch. This allows our clients to swiftly overhaul or retract low-Brand Multiple initiatives before wasting too much money and effort, and to throw more marketing weight behind initiatives whose Brand Multiple indicates a strong potential for a hit in the marketplace.