According to Investopedia, a brand is an intangible marketing or business concept that helps people identify a company, product, service, or individual. A brand can be one item, a family of items, or all items a seller produces. A trademark legally protects a company's brand.
Brand research is figuring out how consumers perceive a brand. It is closely related to consumer research, which studies consumer behavior. Both brand and consumer fall under the umbrella of marketing research, which is figuring out which consumers (out of the entire market) a brand will appeal to. See our Research Consumers and Get Started with Marketing Research guides for more help.
Researching a brand is similar to researching a company or industry. It's finding information about a company focusing on its brand-specific, customer-related aspects (for example, the brand's personality, vision, and how the public perceives it). It's similar to researching a company or industry, but unlike researching companies and industries, you won't find a neatly packaged "brand report" in the library. Researching brands will involve combining many resources to create a picture of your brand.
You can find information about products and company branding in the library's databases. Try searching by combining your brand or product name and different brand-related keywords using the word AND, like:
For example: Nintendo AND "brand identity"
For more tips on combining keywords into an effective search string, see our guide on Drafting Your Search.
Try these databases:
Market share reports will provide a snapshot of the industry in which your brand competes. They may also provide information at the brand level. Market share data will often appear in a table, which may not be accessible in a keyword search, so you will have to open these reports and scan them for data.
See our Research Market Share & Rankings guide for more help.
Company and industry reports will provide information about a brand's company and its affiliated industry. Depending on the brand you are researching, there will be varying amounts of information available. For example, if you are researching the Lowe's brand, there will be many sources of information as opposed to researching a specific product brand like Powerade. You will need to scan the reports to see if a specific product or service is mentioned.
See our Get Started with Industry Research and Get Started with Company Research guides for more help.
Consumer Reports magazine is a go-to source for well-researched reviews and rankings of various brands and products.
Forbes magazine's list of the highest-earning brands as of the year 2020 is useful for brand research because if a brand is high-earning, it's popular with consumers.
Interbrand is a leading brand consulting group that helps brands increase their value. They maintain an annual list of the best global brands as part of that work.
Knowing if a brand has had a lot of recalls is an important part of brand research, but recalls are not all listed in one place. They are listed by the government agency that oversees that industry sector.
Consumer data can be used for focused consumer surveys about perceptions of specific brands or products. For example, you could create a list of all the pickup truck drivers who live in a specific area and then survey them about a local truck dealership chain.
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