4 “Obvious” Questions (with Not-Always-Obvious Answers) to Ask When Designing Your Brand Study
By: Greg Hershberger
3/12/2026
The unique nature of health and wealth industry organizations can present specific challenges when measuring how effective a brand is among its target audience. At times, the main consumer metrics and methods aren’t quite the right fit. The following are four seemingly obvious questions health & wealth organizations should ask when considering conducting brand research.
1. What do we want to get out of this research?
Without clear objectives for the research, the questions you ask will lack direction, leading to respondent fatigue, researcher misprioritization, and a patchwork of only semi-useful results. All of the following objectives may fall under “brand” research, but which are key for your organization?
- Measuring awareness?
- Defining competitor sets?
- Understanding drivers of awareness?
- Brand design testing?
- Brand identity testing?
- Understanding new lines of business and alignment with current perceptions of the brand?
- Something else?
What to Consider: Draft your KPI dashboard/executive summary before even writing the questionnaire. Design the survey to align with your value proposition, positioning pillars, and customer journey. Even set preliminary goal scores – this will structure a study towards outcomes that matter, cutting out noise and questions that aren’t truly worth asking.
2. Who is our audience?
Without a clearly defined audience (and segments), the data becomes less useful and therefore less effective. Will you target decision-makers only, or include influencers, prospects, existing customers, lost customers, or other relevant audiences? Should you exclude customers of some lines of business and include those of others? What is a threshold of “experience” or “familiarity” with a company that would warrant a deeper dive? Does experience or familiarity even matter if perception is king? Answers to these questions may differ from company to company, industry to industry, or year to year. All are variables worth exploring during the design phase.
What to Consider: Take extra care in defining samples for B2B audiences, particularly in the health and wealth space. This can get even more convoluted as we follow the chain of players across the distribution landscape.
3. Is our methodology complete?
Numbers are important. Hitting or exceeding KPI targets means champagne popping in the C-suite. But are numbers everything? Not if there’s something researchers haven’t thought to ask, but customers would be happy to talk about. Qualitative research is a critical companion to quantitative when doing brand work. It can uncover emotions, stories, and true customer connections to the brand that may not be as easily detected in quantitative work but could be if asked in a way that resonates with the target audience.
What to Consider: Qualitative work to ensure that KPIs are:
- Well-understood. For example, “Easy to use” or “Easy to work with” as it pertains to a health insurer may be interpreted one way by a researcher, who might assume they are capturing direct ease of interaction with the carrier, and another way by the customer, who thinks “yeah, I just give them my card at the doctor’s office, that’s easy.” These are two very different definitions.
- For example, the recent $700 million Cracker Barrel rebrand flop may have given too little (or zero) weight to attributes that may not be top of mind to include in a brand study, but proved to be central to the way many of their customers thought about the brand: nostalgia, connection to the past, and the sentimental feelings that accompany these.
4. What questions are appropriate for OUR audiences?
There are some traditional metrics that are associated with most brand studies: Unaided awareness, aided awareness, familiarity, Net Promoter Score (NPS), ad recall, various brand sentiment ratings/associations, etc. But again – not all are appropriate depending on your business, distribution methods, and audience.
What to Consider: If you’re a health or retirement plan provider, many of your end users don’t have much of a say in the company they work with. Instead, that responsibility lies with the employer. So, it may not make sense to ask consumers how likely they are to recommend that product – it wasn’t their choice in the first place, and those they might recommend it to may not have access to it! Additionally, especially in areas like health, different people of different ages with different health conditions will likely have very different needs requiring different solutions, and health is a sensitive topic that many would avoid discussing or making recommendations for. Explore more of our thoughts on NPS as a main metric.
These are questions that Greenwald Research grapples with for every new brand study with each client. They may sound easy on the surface, but require deep thought, expertise, and follow-through to execute and effectively connect your brand to your customers. If your organization seeks insights on how your brand is perceived by your target audience, contact us to learn more about how we can lend a hand.
