Success is a vague term. No? Does a 79% brand equity score or a 82% consumer happiness index or a 1.5 million reach of your campaign good or bad? Do these numbers make your marketing and brand building efforts successful? On the face of it, yeah, they look like great numbers, but if I tell you the average brand equity score of all key brands in the country is 94% , the average happiness index is 88% and the reach is 2.2 million, now with this perspective the numbers don’t look as great, maybe not great at all, perhaps far from successful.
In market research, norms (also called normative data or benchmarks) are established baselines to compare your data against. Norms enable organisations to determine if the results are above or below par. Going back to the example, the numbers on their own were misleading until compared with market norms.
Norms give market researchers the context to fully understand, interpret, and draw implications. For any strategic market research, such as Brand Equity, CX, media measurement etc. it is critical to evaluate performance against established norms.
These norms can be established in many ways. Most boutique market research organisations do not have norms because they don’t have the quantum of past work or scale of work needed to establish norms. The larger ones have norms, mostly global norms and not regional, as even large organisations may not have enough scale of work in a specific category for that market.
At Sila, with advanced AI we have established norms, all regional and all category specific. For instance, for a digital brand equity the norms are based on the performance indicators of more than 3000 brands in the region and for a Customer Happiness Index the scale to establish norms goes into millions of data points. You can compare your performance to the category norms, to the market norms or category×market norms, and even beyond. With AI, the scale to calculate norms enables organisations to compare performance with any variable that is relevant to the business.
These norms help us paint a compelling picture to clients and puts us in a position to measure and track performance that never misleads!
Faisal Khan, VP strategy and insights, Sila
