Brandscapes

BAV is WPP’s brand diagnostics platform.

BAV is a suite of tools built on-top of the longest-running and largest quantitative consumer study of brands in the world.

It draws on data from 50 markets tracking consumer sentiment on brands, usage and advocacy.

The BAV data covers something like 57,000 brands and includes 1.9 million consumers.

It can be used to reliably answer questions like …

Our brand is strong, so why is usage falling?

Which market should we enter next?

Which are the best brands to partner with?

What should we emphasize in our creative strategy?

BAV is a robust research platform and was developed in partnership with some of the world’s top business schools (Columbia, Tuck, Wharton, Haas).

One of BAV's differentiators is its “category-agnostic” view of brands. Rather than segmenting by category (for example, technology providers or online booksellers) it compares brands across categories.

Why?

Because this reflects how consumers see brands (Amazon’s perception as brand is not limited to being a technology provider or online bookseller).

And also because at times, brands themselves choose to defy categories as a strategy (Amazon is both a technology provider, AWS, and online bookseller, Amazon.com and more).

Removing categories as a starting point allows an aggregate picture of brands to emerge as drivers of culture, not only competitors for a particular share of this market or that market.

One of my favorite outputs of BAV is called a “brandscape”. It presents a vibrant but representative picture of the brands that consumers encounter in any of the 50 markets covered by the study.

In years past, usage of BAV was limited to the agency that developed it, Y&R and later VMLY&R. But now it is open to all WPP agencies and employees.

Enablement on the suite of tools (the BAV Academy, BAV certification and so forth) has recently been switched on to skill-up the next circle of users.

In context, the opening up of BAV feels very in-line with the “New WPP” drive toward increasing connections across operating companies.

More here … wppbav.com