Bigger & More Loved

Bigger & More Loved

BrandVue is Savanta’s flagship brand tracking product, providing businesses with deep insights into how their brands are perceived. A key component of BrandVue’s success was the "Most Loved" leaderboard, a ranking system highlighting the most positively perceived brands based on consumer sentiment. This initiative was highly successful in boosting BrandVue’s visibility and credibility, yet we identified a significant gap: users struggled to translate the vast array of BrandVue data into clear, actionable steps.

Problem

BrandVue's "Most Loved" leaderboard was designed to give brands visibility by ranking them based on consumer sentiment. While it successfully positioned us in the market, it primarily served as a high-level brand perception metric rather than a framework for action. Clients appreciated the recognition but often asked, “What do we do with this information?”. This highlighted three core challenges:

  1. Data Overload & Inertia – With over 250+ available metrics, users struggled to identify which ones were most relevant to improving their brand’s position.

  2. Lack of Strategic Insight – Customers needed a structured, actionable way to connect BrandVue data to real-world brand growth strategies rather than just viewing rankings.

  3. Market Credibility & Thought Leadership – While "Most Loved" helped establish BrandVue, it did not provide proprietary intellectual property (IP) that positioned us as forward-thinking in the brand intelligence space.

To address these challenges, we needed to move beyond rankings and develop a structured, research-backed framework that guided brands on how to grow and sustain their success.

Approach

To address these challenges, we collaborated with researchers, UX designers, sales teams, marketing, and clients to develop an intuitive framework. Inspired by the well-established NPS (Net Promoter Score) model, we created a Brand Growth Cycle, a structured yet simple approach to understanding brand performance:

1️⃣ Usage – Consumers interact with your brand.

2️⃣ Love – They have a positive experience and emotionally connect.

3️⃣ Advocacy (NPS) – They recommend your brand.

4️⃣ Buzz – Continuous advocacy generates positive public perception.

🔄 Repeat – Increased buzz leads to more usage.

By presenting this as a cycle, we illustrated how brand usage and customer satisfaction reinforce each other. This framework also helped users pinpoint weaknesses and focus on actionable improvements

Solution Design

📊 Clear Front Page Summary – A top-level view showing a brand’s standing within the cycle, making it instantly digestible.

🔎 Deep-Dive Metric Pages – Each metric was linked to a detailed page answering key strategic questions:

  • Who is driving this score? Demographic insights (e.g., geography, age, customer segments) to inform targeted marketing.

  • What should this score be? Benchmarks against competitors, industry averages, and market leaders.

  • How is it changing? Trend analysis over time to identify growth or decline.

  • What influences this metric? Related factors such as perception, value, ethics, or leadership image.

📝 Blending Data with Narrative – The pages were half text-based, half chart-based to shift BrandVue from being purely data-driven to facilitating clear decision-making for non-technical users. This aligned with a growing need to present validated arguments backed by data, rather than just raw data itself.

💡 Seamless Integration into Marketing & Sales – This framework became a key talking point in pitches, reinforcing BrandVue’s credibility and positioning "Brand Love" as an essential marketing measure. It also tied into our "Most Loved" campaigns, adding analytical rigor to our messaging.

Result

Reflection

✅ Shift in Client Conversations – Instead of "Who are you?", we were increasingly asked to help businesses improve Brand Love as a strategic priority.

✅ Improved Market Positioning – BrandVue became more than a data provider—it was now seen as a thought leader with a proprietary brand performance framework.

✅ Sustained Business Growth – Growth continued at 50% YoY, reversing a prior slowdown.

✅ Stronger Customer Engagement – Clients found the framework easier to explain internally, improving adoption within organizations.

This project reinforced key insights about how users interact with data. The biggest takeaway was that data as an output is becoming less important—what matters more is delivering strategic insight in a digestible way. The rise of large language models (LLMs) further highlights this shift, as businesses increasingly seek clear, data-backed recommendations rather than raw numbers.

Looking forward, our next challenge is ensuring that BrandVue can integrate seamlessly with LLMs, allowing users to ask strategic questions and receive immediate, validated insights, rather than manually sifting through datasets. This project validated our long-term direction: transitioning BrandVue from a reporting tool into a decision-support platform that makes brand growth easy to understand and act upon.

Design