The CoreData-brandmanagement differentiating factor to other research houses is that we are committed to reinventing the research process, by simply doing it better.

The three defining areas CoreData-brandmanagement focuses on to drive the industry forward are:

• Data collection
• Understanding and;
• Visualisation, as these are the factors that make good research great.

To drive CoreData-brandmanagement Labs forward and turn the vision into a reality, we have assigned budget to the project, both in hard currency and in person hours and tied to it staff bonuses, to make sure every month we conduct a task to drive the technical ability of the business, and the people who work in the business, forward.

Following is the July 2010 focus area for CoreData-brandmanagement Labs.

Brand Authenticity

For the past few years we have been interested in the way that businesses and banks in particular measure how their brand is tracking.
The most common way banks measure people's opinion about them is a tool called the Nett Promoter Score (NPS), essentially the number of people who use their brand that would recommend to others. Usually it's a score between 1 and 10.

We noticed a curious thing about these scores, the smaller banks and the credit unions always scored better than the big four banks, and that St George, Bendigo & Adelaide Bank and the IMB Credit Union had higher Net Promoter Scores than the Commonwealth Bank or Westpac.

Thinking about this we thought if these numbers are true and they are more attractive than the big banks, then they must be able to charge a premium for their services, and would be growing faster than the big four, which is actually not true as the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac are the fastest growing banks in Australia.

Then we pondered, something else must be at work.

So we decided to consider something else, the concept of brand authenticity, which is measured by two factors:

• The idea of reliability - which is a function of how much a brand does what it says its going to do, and;
• Truthfulness - the idea of how much a brand is what it says it is.

These two elements taken together build a measure of authenticity.

If you would like a detailed picture of the outcome of this research on Brand Authenticity, simply email me at Andrew@brandmanagement.com.au and I will forward you a presentation on the most authentic financial services brands in Australia.