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Socratic CollageBuilderSM
Description: Brand personality is a well-established technique to augment the reality content of brand messaging. The Socratic CollageBuilderSM gives respondents the opportunity to select visual and text elements to represent the persona of a brand or product.
Characteristics: CollageBuilder presents the respondent with a visual inventory of graphics, photos and illustrations that can be used to profile the product/brand being categorized. Visual inventory elements have been pre-screened are frequently updated to provide a normative database of cognitive associations on a number of established dimensions such as:
- Expensive/ Inexpensive
- High Quality/ Low Quality
- Mature/ Youthful
- Friendly/ Impersonal
- Modern/ Old Fashioned
- Trustworthy/ Untrustworthy
- Business Like/ Casual
- Masculine/ Feminine
- Natural/ Artificial
Output: Deliverables from this process include a multi-dimensional brand map of the brands being tested. This map will also show the positions of other well-known brands as a normative reference. If multiple brands are tested within a category, a market segment map may be constructed showing the brands tested and a hypothetical "ideal position" in the overall personality mix.
This is another technique that was originally pioneered as a focus group exercise for building graphic representations of brands as a way of communicating aspects of "brand personality." This technique usually involves distributing magazines or other sets of pictures and symbols, then asking people to cut and paste together a pictorial collage which captures elements thought by participants to be indicative of some aspect of the brand's character and generally accepted positioning.
Socratic's CollageBuilderSM brings the process online and allows respondents to drag and drop various graphic elements into a field to represent various brand characteristics. The specific elements themselves do not need to carry any generally accepted meanings.
While the general assignments may reveal some high-level associations, the individual's interpretation is needed to understand the full reasoning process. Following the creation of the brand collage, the respondents are then asked to describe, in detail, why they chose various graphics to represent the brand. It is this description and rationale that is usually of most interest to the researcher.
Because many studies have shown that computer-based entry yields longer, higher quality open-ended descriptions than hand-written forms, a great deal of rich insight is a by-product of this mode of testing.
