Your market size is the total number of people who are expressing a purchase intent for a product like yours. So for example, the number of people who are planning to switch insurance providers, or number of people who have bought a streaming subscription, or are regularly buying non-dairy milk. This is in contrast to segments, like “women aged under 40” who might be a target audience but who have not expressed a purchase intent.

Understanding the size of your market is the key starting point in your brand marketing strategy. This is the making of your product-market fit as you begin to understand the potential in your new or existing market. It is the numerator for all other brand KPIs: what share of your target market knows you? How many of those people have a favourable view of your brand? How many of those people would consider busing your brand etc. 

For every industry or category, we ask a sample of about 50,000 people per year whether they are currently buying or planning to buy a product of that category. With almost 200 industries that we’re tracking across dozens of markets, this means that we’re asking close to 10 million people per year around the world about their purchase intentions. We also collect demographic data, which enables us to use our sample data to project how many people are likely to buy a certain product. 

In contrast to one-off studies that might miss seasonal effects or could be subject to other biases, we collect market size data on an ongoing basis - every day of the year. This enables us to more accurately estimate market sizes and also detect trends and seasonality.

Purchase drivers measure how important certain drivers are in influencing people’s choices of whether to buy a product or not. Do people who consider buying an e-bike value battery life or design more highly? Is delivery speed more important than meal variety for a food delivery service? Is quality a more important purchase driver than cost? 

Understanding purchase drivers is a key to developing a brand positioning strategy; if price is the overarching driver of purchase decisions, positioning a brand as premium quality is unlikely to produce good results. If, by contrast, price is not an important driver, then focusing on the ones that have such an impact will yield instant returns. 

For each product category, we ask about 10,000 people per year to identify the criteria that are most important for them when considering purchasing an item. To understand the relative importance of each driver, we then compare the results to the importance of these drivers across all product categories. This enables us to understand not only how important a specific driver is relative to others in that product category, but also how important it is overall in driving the purchase of a product. If, for instance, we see that both quality and price are among the top drivers, but price is mentioned often when compared with our global average, then we can conclude that this product category is particularly price sensitive. 

Brand awareness measures the number of people who know a brand. It’s probably the single most important metric for brand marketing for the simple reason that if your target audience doesn't know your brand, then your brand doesn’t exist (for those people). Brand awareness is the first stage in the brand marketing funnel and answers the core question: what share of my target audience knows my brand?

For all but the most well-known brands, increasing awareness is a key component of brand marketing. Tracking how many people become aware of a brand and how much it costs to add eg 100k people to the top of the funnel is a key metric to assess the performance of brand marketing. 

Latana uses a “prompted” method to assess brand awareness, where we show people the logo of a brand and ask them whether they know the brand. We give them the opportunity to choose ‘not sure’ to avoid any bias that could come from confusing a brand with that of a similar one. We ensure that logos don’t appear alongside more famous brands otherwise it could influence the awareness of less known brands. We also measure brand awareness on a general population level, and on a target audience level. While the target audience level might be more relevant, population level enables us to assess the efficiency of brand marketing. 

Brand understanding is a KPI that measures what share of people who are aware of a brand also know what it does. 

It’s estimated that on average, people see 5,000 ads per day, making us passively aware of tens of thousands of brands over time. Tracking the share of people who know what a brand does is the first step towards understanding how effective marketing is in communicating what a brand does. 

We show people who are aware of a brand three different categories, only one accurately represents the category that a brand serves. For example, for a kids e-learning provider, we’d ask could this be “education”, “finance” and “food”(we also add a “don’t know” answer option). We then ask people which of the categories they associate most closely with the brand to calculate the share of those people who correctly identify the category and those that don’t. We consider scores above 80% to indicate a high degree of brand understanding, a score of 60-80% to indicate a medium degree of brand understanding, and a score below 60% to indicate a low level of brand understanding. 

Brand perception measures whether people have a positive or negative sentiment towards a brand and tracks changes over time. 

Few brands elicit strong emotions, but if they do, these emotions can be very powerful, both in a positive and in a negative way. Brands who have strong positive perceptions often benefit tremendously from word of mouth effects, which can be an accelerator of any marketing effort. Brands who have a strong negative perception suffer from the opposite and brand marketing becomes an uphill struggle. Knowing overall brand perception is key to understanding the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of brand marketing.

We ask people who are aware of a brand whether they have a positive or negative perception of a brand. We then subtract the latter from the former to calculate a net-perception ranking which theoretically ranges from -100% (if everyone has a negative perception) to +100% (if everyone has a positive perception). In practice, the range is much smaller, with most companies ranging between -10% and +10%. 

Brand association measures how aligned a brand’s perception is with the key purchase drivers. 

Once a brand is widely known among the target audience, the key driver in the path to purchase is how a brand is perceived, and in particular whether people’s associations with a brand are in line with what they say is important for them when making a purchase decision. So if, for example, quality is a key driver for purchase decisions, but a brand is not perceived as high quality, this is an important challenge in turning awareness into increased sales. 

We assess what are the product category’s most important purchase drivers and ask people about whether they associate these with all the brands that are in the competitive set. Based on this, we create a ranking of brands on the different categories, and an overall score of how good the “brand positioning fit” is.

Brand consideration measures which brands in a certain product category people would consider buying. After awareness, understanding and perception, it is the fourth key stage in the brand funnel towards the purchase. Another way to look at brand consideration is to see it as the total serviceable market, ie the number of people in a certain market who know the brand and have indicated that they would consider buying it. 

To be in the “consideration set” is a key step for any consumer product and the goal should be to be in the consideration set of all consumers who (a) are currently buying or are planning to buy a product in this category, and (b) are aware of the brand. If there is a large gap in this step, it can point towards poor positioning, especially if key competitor brands are in the consideration set. 

Latana shows users a selection of the brands that they are aware of and ask them to select those that they would consider buying. Using demographic and other profile data, Latana then calculates the absolute number of people who would consider buying a brand.

Brand preference is all about whether you’re winning against the competition. Up to the consideration stage, brand performance is isolated from the competition. The brand preference stage is where people indicate their first choice and which brand or product they would choose. 

Brand preference is as close to the actual purchase decision as it gets, and at this stage. Brands that have high awareness, a very positive perception on the drivers that matter and that are in the consideration set, have done their homework well. The brand preference stage indicates why all this is still not translating into additional sales: because the competition is even stronger. Looking at the preference distribution can also be indicative of the strength of individual brands in a product category: if one or two brands clearly dominate, it is usually much more resource intensive to get a foothold in a market than if preferences are more evenly distributed.   

Similar to assessing brand consideration, Lantana shows users a selection of the brands that they are aware of. This time, however, we ask them to select the one that they prefer over all the other brands. Using demographic and other profile data, Latana then calculates the absolute number of people who prefer a brand over all the others.    

You’re rarely alone in a market, but just because there are competitors doesn’t mean that they pose a challenge for you. The brand competition KPI measures the strength of the brand compared to the competition in your market and how that changes over time.

Understanding the degree of brand competition is a key point of information for your marketing campaign; if your market is very competitive, building a competitive positioning is usually more resource intensive than creating a leading brand in a market where few other brands dominate. 

Brand competition can also be very powerful in combination with market size estimates as they inform international expansion strategies. If you have the choice between a large market that has low brand competition, and a small one with high brand competition, you’ll find it much easier to grow through brand in the former than in the latter.  

In every industry we track, we monitor a few dozen brands. This gives us a good understanding of the competitive density across industries. If the top three brands by awareness are known by at least 50% of the market, we consider this to be a highly competitive market. Meaning, if you’re not amongst the top-three, it’ll be a high effort to build a competitive brand in this market. If the top three brands average between 25% and 50%, we consider this to be a medium competitive market; and if they average below 25% awareness, then this market is currently not very brand competitive.