6 Brand Research Platforms: Types & When to Use Each

In general, brand research platforms can be categorized into three main types:

• Survey tools, which are ideal for collecting quantitative data from large sample sizes to gain insights into overall brand perceptions, purchase behaviors, brand awareness levels, and more.

• Social listening tools, which let you monitor and analyze brand mentions, sentiment, and organic conversations happening on social media platforms.

• Direct customer feedback tools (interviews, focus groups, in-home product testing, etc.), which provide rich qualitative insights by engaging with customers 1-on-1.

In this post, we cover 6 brand research platforms — each with its own unique strengths and focus areas:

1. Pollfish: Our survey-focused DIY tool offering quick turnaround times, transparent pay-per-response pricing, and access to diverse, high-quality respondent pools.
2. Qualtrics: A survey-focused tool with pricing and features more suited for larger enterprise companies.
3. Kantar: Pricing geared towards enterprise companies. Best known for their full-service brand research consulting offerings, which combine surveys with additional research approaches.
4. Brandwatch: Specializes in social listening and tracking brand mentions on social media platforms.
5. Suzy: While they offer surveys, a standout feature is Suzy Live, which lets you conduct 1-on-1 interviews, focus groups, and in-home product testing all within one platform.
6. GWI: While they offer surveys, you can also get synthetic data via GWI Spark, an AI assistant that answers questions about your audience using GWI’s global survey data. This provides more accurate insights compared to searching the web.

1. Pollfish

Pollfish is our user-friendly, DIY survey solution that companies of all sizes use to conduct brand research.

In the sections below, we’ll cover:

• How to run brand research surveys using Pollfish in three steps: Design your questionnaire, select your survey audience, and analyze your data.

• The advantages of Pollfish’s first-party respondent communities: Access higher quality audiences and survey responses compared to competitors who purchase respondents from external third-party panels.

• Pollfish’s transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing model: Our pricing model offers greater affordability than competitors who charge subscription fees.

• The quick turnaround times you can expect from Pollfish: Turnaround times range from just a few hours for mainstream audiences to a few days for more niche audiences.

3 Simple Steps for Running Brand Research Surveys with Pollfish

Running brand research surveys with Pollfish involves three key steps:

• Step 1: Design your questionnaire — Start with brand research survey templates or create a survey from scratch. Choose from 14 question types and take advantage of advanced features like screening questions, conditional branching based on previous responses, answer shuffling, and much more.

• Step 2: Select your survey audience — No matter how broad or niche you want your audience to be, Pollfish can accommodate your needs with 50+ audience filters to choose from.

• Step 3: Analyze your data — Easily visualize and manipulate your survey data within our platform to gain the insights you need, rather than having to export to Excel.

Pollfish excels in these areas, allowing you to conduct brand research without compromising your objectives or methodology due to platform limitations.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these steps.

Step #1: Design Your Questionnaire

Although not a complete list, the following are some of our most frequently utilized questionnaire design features:

❇️ Brand Research Templates

While you can create surveys from scratch, many choose to utilize brand research survey templates with pre-written questions that can be customized as needed.

These templates offer 3 benefits:

• Save time by providing a starting point for your survey.

• Employ methodological best practices to ensure high-quality data collection.

• Ensure consistency across surveys, allowing you to benchmark changes over time and easily compare data from past surveys.

Popular templates include:

• Brand Awareness Template: Assess whether consumers are familiar with your brand or have heard of it at a minimum.

• Brand Perception Template: Understand how your brand is perceived compared to competitor brands.

• Brand Diagnostic Template: Evaluate your brand’s overall health at a specific point in time.

• CPG Brand Awareness + Perceptions Template: Measure consumer familiarity and perceptions of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands

❇️ 16 Question Types

No matter which type of questions you want to use for your brand research questionnaire, Pollfish has you covered with 16 question types, including: Single selection, Multiple selection, Open ended, Numeric open ended, Description, Rating stars, Slider, Ranking, Matrix single selection, Matrix multiple selection, Net Promoter Score (NPS), A/B test, Conjoint analysis, Max Diff, and Van Westendorp.

• Screening Logic: Filter out participants who don’t meet specific criteria.
  • Example: If a respondent answers “No” to the question, “Are you aware of [Brand X]?”, you can route them to the survey’s conclusion page. If they select “Yes,” you can display follow-up questions about [Brand X]’s perceived quality.

• Conditional Branching: Create personalized survey paths based on respondents’ answers, presenting them with tailored follow-up questions.
  • Example: In a smartphone preference survey, ask participants what they prioritize most when selecting a device (battery life, camera quality, or brand reputation). Using conditional branching, direct them to different question sets based on their selected priority.

• Answer Shuffling: Randomize the order of answer choices presented to each respondent to minimize order bias.
  • Example: When asking respondents to rank their favorite soda brands, one respondent might see “Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite,” while another sees “Sprite, Fanta, Coca-Cola.” This minimizes bias from respondents consistently favoring options at the top or bottom of the list.

❇️ “Other” and “None of the Above”

When creating brand research surveys, you’ll often need to include “Other” or “None of the above” as answer choices. Instead of wasting time manually adding these options to each question (a notoriously frustrating task for market researchers), you can automatically add these answer options to each question with just a few clicks.

❇️ Click here to see the full list of advanced questionnaire design features.

Step #2: Select Your Survey Audience

Regardless of how broad or niche your desired audience may be, Pollfish can help:

❇️ Choose from 50+ audience filters in 6 categories, including: Demographics, Geographic Criteria, Consumer Lifestyle, Employment & Occupation, Behavioral Data, and Media.

For example, you could target millennial female grocery shoppers in Los Angeles between 29–44 years old with household incomes exceeding $50,000 who have recently purchased cold cereal.

❇️ Target shoppers who have bought specific brands or visited certain stores: Rather than broadly targeting “cold cereal” buyers, you can refine your audience to include those who have purchased specific brands like Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Reese’s Puffs, etc.

Similarly, you can target shoppers of particular stores such as Whole Foods, Zara, Costco, etc. This data is sourced from self-uploaded receipts by panel members, ensuring greater accuracy compared to potentially exaggerated self-reported information.

❇️ Set audience quotas: Avoid skewing results with an imbalanced sample by setting audience quotas. For instance, you can require 50% of respondents to be Millennials (ages 29–44) and 50% to be Gen X (ages 45–60).

These are just a few of the audience targeting capabilities available within Pollfish.

Step #3: Analyze Your Survey Results

Pollfish simplifies the process of visualizing survey results, manipulating and filtering data, and obtaining insights, all within a single platform, eliminating the need for external data analysis tools like Excel.

❇️ Visualize Survey Results in Various Formats

For each survey question, easily visualize the data using color-coded charts, graphs, tables, and more.

❇️ Filter by Specific Audience Segments or Responses

If you want to display survey results from a specific age group (e.g., millennials aged 29–44) or zero in on particular responses (e.g., only those who are “highly likely” to recommend your brand), you can do so with just a few clicks. All charts and visualizations will automatically update to reflect the filtered data.

❇️ Filter and analyze data by multiple variables simultaneously

Suppose you wanted to compare purchasing intent across 4 different demographics, such as age, gender, household income, and geography, you could easily filter, splice, and dice the data to get the exact answers you need. Pollfish also automatically generates graphs based on your selected variables, eliminating the need to export the data to third-party tools.

❇️ Customize Charts to Match Your Branding

You can customize each graph to fit your brand’s color scheme. For example, if your brand colors are yellow (#FFFF00) and red (#FF0000), you can easily apply these colors to the graphs.

❇️ Statistical Testing

Suppose you ran a survey to compare brand awareness between two age groups: 29–44 and 45–60. The results reveal that 75% of respondents aged 29–44 know your brand, while only 60% of those aged 45–60 do. You have the option to turn on stat testing to check if this difference is statistically significant.

Pollfish will automatically highlight the results in a graph, which you can export using standard statistical notation, with capital and lowercase letters indicating the significance level.

❇️ Create Presentations within the Platform

Build presentation slides within Pollfish while your survey is still in the field, allowing you to have a nearly complete report by the time the survey is finished. Export the presentation into an editable PowerPoint file for further customization.

❇️ Export Data in Multiple Formats

Easily export your survey data to PDF, Excel, crosstabs, and SPSS, depending on your needs.

These are just a few of the data analysis capabilities available within Pollfish.

Advantages of Pollfish’s First-Party Respondent Communities

Pollfish’s proprietary first-party respondent panels (owned and operated through parent company Prodege) ensure high-quality survey responses. This sets us apart from competitors who purchase survey respondents from external third-party providers. Here’s how:

❇️ Genuine Human Participants, Not Bots

Our panelists participate in a range of activities within the Prodege ecosystem, from online shopping and receipt uploads to gaming, web browsing, and more. These are all activities bots simply cannot perform, ensuring that your survey audience consists of genuine, verified human participants.

In contrast, many 3rd party providers limit respondents’ activities to surveys alone, which often leads to bots and fraudulent responses.

❇️ Panelists Aren’t Bombarded with Constant Survey Invites

Our panelists choose when to take surveys at their discretion. This approach attracts more engaged, higher-quality respondents. It stands in stark contrast to 3rd-party providers who blast respondents with emails and text messages to participate, leading to survey fatigue, disengagement, and lower quality responses.

❇️ 30-Day Evaluation for New Panelists

New respondents must complete a 30-day evaluation period, answering internal profiling surveys. Those who fail to meet our stringent quality standards are filtered out, ensuring only the most reliable participants make it to your surveys.

❇️ Rigorous Anti-Fraud Measures

Pollfish includes unique user IDs (prevents duplicate survey takers), trap questions, speeding prevention, anti-VPN measures, gibberish detection, straight-lining detection (detects if folks repeatedly select the same answer), and human review.

❇️ Trust Scores Encourage High-Quality Responses

Pollfish assigns each respondent a “trust score” based on the quality of their survey responses over time. Panelists with higher trust scores gain access to more survey opportunities and other lucrative activities within the Prodege ecosystem.

These are just a few ways Pollfish ensures the highest-quality respondents for your brand research needs. This is crucial because even the most meticulously crafted survey will yield compromised results if your respondent pool contains bots or participants who rush through responses without careful consideration.

Transparent, Pay-per-Response Pricing Model

Companies of all sizes benefit from our transparent, pay-per-response pricing model:

❇️ Usage-Based Pricing

Unlike some competitors who charge hefty monthly or annual subscription fees (which may result in paying for unused capacity), Pollfish charges based on the number of responses you’d like to receive. This ensures that you only pay for what you use.

❇️ Unlimited Team Members

With Pollfish, you can add unlimited team members to your account without incurring any extra costs. In contrast, subscription-based tools often charge for additional licenses, which can quickly add up.

❇️ Transparent Pricing with No Hidden Fees

At Pollfish, the price displayed is exactly what you pay, with no unexpected charges.

For example, suppose you want to run a brand perception survey for your dog food company. You start with a base cost of $0.95 per response. Then, you can choose to add audience targeting filters.

For instance:

• Targeting households with an income over $200,000 would add $0.55 per response
• Targeting dog owners would add another $0.55 per response

In this scenario, the cost per response would be $2.05. If you need 600 responses for your survey, the total cost would be $1,230.

That’s precisely what you would pay — no surprises, no hidden fees.

Fast Turnaround Time: From Several Hours to a Few Days

We take pride in delivering exceptionally fast turnaround times, made possible by our proprietary first-party respondent communities.

❇️ General Population Surveys (Mainstream Topics)

For surveys targeting mainstream audiences (such as streaming service subscribers, frequent takeout orderers, pet owners, etc.), we can often gather 500+ responses within just a few hours.

❇️ Niche or Highly Targeted Audience Surveys

When surveying niche audiences (such as aerospace engineers, board-certified dermatologists, etc.), the inherently smaller populations and fewer qualifying respondents typically result in a turnaround time of a few days. However, the exact timeline varies based on the specificity of your criteria.

Have questions about the turnaround time for your specific audience? We’d be happy to help — please reach out to discuss your specific needs.

Get Started with Pollfish

To begin using Pollfish, you have three options:

• Create a free account to explore the platform and start creating your own surveys right away.

• Schedule a demo walkthrough to learn how Pollfish can support your specific brand research objectives.

• Inquire about our full-service brand research option, where our experienced team will manage your entire project from start to finish. This includes crafting the survey, identifying and targeting your ideal audience, analyzing data, and delivering a customized report tailored to your unique needs and objectives.

2. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a platform geared towards larger enterprises, with pricing to match. In contrast, Pollfish offers a more accessible and cost-effective solution that’s well-suited for businesses of all sizes.

To help you understand the key differences between Pollfish and Qualtrics, we’ve conducted an in-depth analysis that covers crucial aspects such as data quality, pricing, customer support, and more.

3. Kantar

Kantar is primarily geared towards serving enterprise clients. While they offer DIY options, their core focus is on providing strategic consulting and full-service research solutions.

Kantar has a strong specialization in brand research and strategy. Some of their key brand-focused offerings include:

• BrandDynamics (brand tracking)
• BrandEvaluator (brand equity measurement)
• BrandSnapshot powered by BrandZ (brand equity snapshot)
• BrandCampaign (creative mix optimization)

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch can help you gain valuable consumer insights beyond traditional methods like surveys and focus groups. Here are some of its key features and benefits:

• Monitor when people mention your brand name across various online channels, including social media platforms, news outlets, popular broadcast sources, and more.
• Identify which keywords and hashtags are trending in relation to your brand. For example, discover that there were 350 mentions using the hashtag #ecofriendly for your brand in a specific time period. This information can help you make more informed decisions.
• Perform a historical trend analysis to see how topics related to your brand have evolved and gain actionable insights.
• Compare your brand’s online presence and social media engagement with your competitors through social consumer research.

5. Suzy

While Suzy offers survey capabilities, what truly sets it apart is its qualitative research functionality. A particular standout feature, Suzy Live, provides an all-in-one market research platform where you can facilitate:

• One-on-one interviews
• Focus groups for collaborative discussions
• In-home product testing with real-time feedback

6. GWI

GWI provides survey capabilities, but one of its most distinctive features is GWI Spark, an AI-powered assistant. GWI Spark utilizes the company’s extensive global survey data to precisely answer questions about your target audience, delivering more accurate insights than those obtained through web searches.

Furthermore, GWI offers a wide range of data sets covering various demographics and consumer behavior patterns in areas like sports, gaming, travel, automotive, consumer technology, luxury goods, and several others.

Get Started with Pollfish

To begin using Pollfish:

• Create a free account
• Schedule a demo walkthrough
• Inquire about our full-service brand research