US manufacturer weighs consolidating its acquired brands

A US manufacturing company needed a brand awareness assessment to assess whether it should consolidate its acquired sub-brands

Image: Manufacturing brand awareness assessment

The Challenge

Four sub-brands across different manufacturing verticals

The US manufacturer wanted to understand the competitive value for its acquired companies, as well as the opportunities and risks of rebranding them. The client’s need was complex as there were four manufacturing sub-brands in separate verticals. For each brand, the client needed to understand brand awareness, usage and advocacy. It also wanted to assess the importance of different value drivers for purchasing decisions, the perceived value, and the impact of a rebranding. This required a B2B market research agency with deep experience in manufacturing market research to design an effective brand equity study that would evaluate every option.

Our Approach

Quantitative survey that assessed every option

Werk Insight, a B2B market research company, designed a quantitative survey with dynamic brand options. This ensured that the survey was tailored to the sub-brand products used by each respondent. We conducted CATI interviews with over 500 end customers and 200 distributors across the U.S. and Canada.

In our analysis of the data, we used brand funnels to assess which of the four brands were best at retaining customers. A value matrix evaluated cost perceptions and whether customers felt the quality of the product justified the price.

The Insight

Recommendation for whether to consolidate brands

The insights from the survey benchmarked the market value of each of the four sub-brands. It also unearthed opportunities for the manufacturer to raise its prices.

We combined this with internal revenue and SKU data to outline four strategic scenarios for the manufacturer, and the impact they would have:

1.       Business as usual – maintaining the current brand portfolio

2.       Rationalization – cutting smaller, less well-known brands

3.       Consolidation – merging larger, similar brands that serve the same space

4.       Single brand strategy – unifying everything under one brand

We provided our recommendation for which scenario would deliver the most impact for the manufacturing company, including specifics on which sub-brands to sunset or merge.