The Brand Funnel
Strategic Brand Insights
What is the Brand Funnel?
The Brand Funnel model (also known as the Brand Pyramid) is designed to help brands grow through a series of steps.
It’s a fantastic concept that reveals the journey your customers take towards brand loyalty, helping you make better strategic decisions that drive growth. Think of the Brand Funnel as a brilliant, strategic framework that helps you to understand where your brand sits.
How far down the funnel are your customers? Why? What are your brand’s strengths? Where are the problems or blocks? Why have some of your customers not moved further down the funnel to become more brand loyal?
Mapping your existing and target customers’ brand journeys (and exploring the results through in-depth analysis) removes the guesswork, highlights areas for improvement, and sets you on course for success.
The funnel focuses on five key metrics – Awareness, Interest, Trial, Satisfaction and Loyalty – and is an integral part of our BrandVision approach. It’s also directly related to 3 of our 9 key success drivers – Mindshare, Interest and Loyalty.
How to use the brand funnel
As your customers move through the various levels (or emotional phases) of the Brand Funnel, you can adapt and change your strategies to optimise your Brand’s effectiveness and reach.
Understanding how strongly your consumers connect with your brand is key – it’s at the very heart of all brand health studies. Brand Funnel analysis shows that the stronger your customers feel about your brand (satisfaction and loyalty stages), the greater your power and influence over your competition, suppliers, and customers.
Your ultimate goal, as a brand owner? To maximise the number of loyalists and promoters who will sell your brand for you.
The Brand Funnel model, along with its measurement and analysis, is a cornerstone of Brand Equity measurement and a fundamental feature of most brand health and brand tracking studies. But one key element is often overlooked. Because customer spend can be attributed within each level of the funnel (and the number of people within each tier), the model is also a brilliant tool to measure the financial benefits of progressing customers down the funnel to become loyal customers.
Working out where your brand sits can help you to understand the challenges you face – and equip you with the insight you need to move forward.
New brands often struggle to create Brand Awareness and Mindshare in the early days of their product’s life cycle, whereas established brands are more likely to struggle with consideration and satisfaction.
And whilst some brands deliver high levels of satisfaction, this alone is not enough to guarantee customer loyalty – especially if the brand is perceived as low-value or lacking a strong emotional connection.
Indifferent brands tend to have very skinny brand funnels because they have low consideration, low usage and low brand loyalty. Brands that are liked (but not loved) have high consideration and usage, but without a strong emotional connection, they tend to have low loyalty.
The strongest brands have the most robust brand funnel metrics, with strong Brand Emotion, purchase, repeat and loyalty scores.
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Q&A Vision One’s brand research solutions
Brand market research specifically examines how customers perceive, experience, and connect with a particular brand and its competitors. It’s focused on brand equity, positioning, awareness, loyalty, and emotional resonance.
Brand research companies typically answer questions like: How many people are aware of my brand? What does our brand stand for in customers’ minds? How do we compare to competitors on brand attributes? What drives brand preference and loyalty? How strong is our brand awareness? Which brands to watch out for and have momentum.
Branding market research dives deep into the intangible assets that differentiate one company from another beyond product features and pricing. It measures brand health through metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), brand recall, consideration rates, and emotional associations.
We deliver a comprehensive suite of market research solutions designed to drive strategic growth. Our top market research company services include
- Advertising research and Ad testing
- Brand research (identity and brand equity)
- Brand tracking studies
- Business-to-business research
- Customer satisfaction and CX
- Ethnography and observation
- Idea generation and Co-creation
- International & global research
- Market segmentation and personas
- Messaging and Copy testing
- Online research and online surveys
- Pricing Research
- Proposition and Concept testing
- NPD and Product research
- Research training & Consultancy
- Shopper insights and Retail research
- Usage & Attitude surveys
We combine qualitative insight, workshops, and strategic analysis to uncover the core value your brand offers customers. Through techniques such as focus groups, stakeholder interviews, and competitor mapping, we help identify the positioning that will resonate most strongly with your audience and set you apart from competitors.
Effective brand strategy must be built on real customer insight. Our research helps businesses understand how customers perceive the category, what drives choice, and where opportunities exist for differentiation. This ensures your brand strategy is rooted in evidence rather than assumptions.
Kantar
Known for brand equity frameworks such as Meaningful, Different and Salient.
System1 Group
Focuses on emotional response and System 1 advertising effectiveness.
Vision One
Known for BrandVision and its brand wheel and the 8 brand equity metrics (including Brand Momentum).
Vision One offers extensive brand marketing research solutions, spanning qualitative and quantitative methods. Key benefits include:
- Pioneering techniques to uncover new insights and a deeper understanding of customers
- Latest advanced technology for enhanced data analysis and coding
- MRS Company Partners for the highest ethical standards of research
Here’s our top 5 resources for brands:
WARC and Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) offer excellent range of case studies, research and insights into advertiing and marketing effectiveness
If you’re passionate about the history of brands – why not checkout the museum of brands.
Need the insights to make smarter, more confident decisions?
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