Hall & Partners Debuts Brand Engagement Measure

Brand and communications research agency Hall & Partners has rolled out its Engager tool, which measures how people think and feel - both consciously and unconsciously - about brands, and how they engage with them.

Part of the Omnicom Group's Diversified Agency Services (DAS), Hall & Partners has offices in New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Shanghai, Sydney, Paris, and Berlin, with plans to commence operations in Singapore shortly.

Engager aims to identify the link between brand engagement and brand value by conducting detailed research among the general public and business-to-business audiences, and linking these findings to company profits and stock market expectations as well as past and future purchase intent.

Hall & Partners says traditional brand equity models are outdated as they fail to capture how people really form relationships with brands today.

The new tool breaks down 'engagement' into nine areas, such as brand advocacy, knowledge, integrity and understanding. Consumers complete 14 questions which score a brand against these components, with results feeding in to a brand index validated against the Forbes 2009 database of brands. This, Hall & Partners says, enables brands to be rated against their competitors.

The new proprietary model has already been piloted across 12 categories in the UK, US, Australia and China.

Back in February, Engager was used to determine the top 10 most engaging brands in the UK - with Google topping the list, closely followed by Cadbury and Amazon.

At the time, CEO Vanella Jackson noted how well technology brands performed during the study, and said that it was no surprise that Cadburys came out of the study as one of the UK's most engaging brands.

'With the merger of Cadbury/Kraft in final stages of discussion, it will be interesting to see how this impacts on the incredibly strong relationships consumers hold with the brand,' she added.

Web site: www.hall-and-partners.com .