Tool: Brand TAT
Why
Customary projective brand evaluations try to project brand attributes onto people, lifeworlds, or even animals. However, if the report only offers up descriptive personality traits such as “Brand X is 30 years old, a manager, someone who enjoys holidaying on Hawaii”, then the projective technique quickly becomes reduced to a decorative but meaningless accessory. Test persons have the tendency to attribute only positive characteristics to a brand (particularly when just 10 minutes have been allocated to this part of the discussion guide).
What
The Brand TAT enables productive brand characterisations to be deployed for brand stretching, brand analyses and positioning. While a brand may be sociable, spontaneous and contemporary, this can prove very counter-productive in the context of dark chocolate, for example. A projective technique such as september’s Brand TAT always keeps the category context in mind to come up with evaluative statements rather than impressive-sounding but empty words.
How
Instead of paring down brand images to personas without a context, our Brand TAT allows us to show not only the tonality of the brand but also its psychological function within the category. Using a validated set of pictures (whose conscious and unconscious attributes are known to us), test persons assign to the brands what they consider to be matching pictures. The functional psychogram of a brand can then be unlocked from the ‘secret’ picture attributes.