Synovate's Brand Lab: The Conceptual S.W.A.T. Team in South Africa

When is ambivalence a good thing? The answer is when you're a brand competing to gain competitors' market share, according to Jan Hofmeyr, Synovate's Interactive Director of Innovation. Jan and his team are helping clients to turn ambivalence into brand equity and push marketing research to the next level.

Synovate's Brand Lab, a new and very young team in South Africa, are defining the future of marketing research. Since establishing their office nestled in the mountains and countryside of Cape Town in July 2006, the team has produced a truly innovative tool called Brand Value Creator (BVC).

With many current research models showing their age and becoming obsolete, BVC has developed into a key differentiator for Synovate, combining traditional thinking with a new pillar in the research paradigm; a tool which can accurately measure a brand's success.
"The moment I joined Synovate, I started working on BVC and there were two things in particular that I wanted to do," says Jan Hofmeyr. "The first was to provide the best possible measure of what is classically called brand equity, which I refer to as the attitudinal strength of a brand. And the second piece was something that's missing from all brand research and that is a decent measure of the extent to which market circumstances prevent people from buying what they want."

These 'barriers', as Hofmeyr calls them, can be anything ranging from simple economics, such as affordability and distribution, to more complex issues such as governmental policies which aim to retain the strength of national brands.

But business contracts can also affect consumer choice. If the company you work for has a contract with a specific airline, for example, you will be obligated to fly with that airline. Or closer to home, mortgages are set by contracts that can impede consumer choice by pricing the opposition out through steep penalties for changing lenders.