Brandtrends uses smartinterview to unlock richer kids and families brand insight faster.

Introduction

BrandTrends is a leading platform for behavioral insights on families and children, covering more than 50 countries. Based in Dubai, BrandTrends helps entertainment, kids and family brands understand their audiences, track brand performance and make better-informed decisions worldwide.

SmartInterview enhances the BrandTrends tracker by adding faster, deeper and more scalable qualitative insights. Through AI-powered questioning, voice and text responses, and automated classification, BrandTrends can capture the “why” behind consumer behavior while reducing the time and cost required to process large volumes of data.

Preview

Higher-quality brand feedback
Open-ended responses help explain the reasons behind awareness, preference, usage and purchase intention. SmartInterview also leverages BrandTrends’ historical brand data to recognize and classify brand mentions with greater accuracy.
4.4× faster open-ended responses
Respondents can answer by voice or text, making it easier to express richer opinions. Voice responses are collected up to 4.4× faster, enabling more qualitative depth without significantly increasing questionnaire length.
Richer consumer insights
SmartInterview generates up to 2.5× more qualitative depth, helping brands better understand the motivations, perceptions and associations behind quantitative KPIs.
Data available within minutes
SmartInterview integrates directly with BrandTrends’ data infrastructure, making structured and classified responses available within minutes. BrandTrends can therefore provide its clients with faster, more granular and explainable insights across markets and tracking waves.

“This strategic alliance with Smartinterview marks a monumental step for BrandTrends Group. By integrating their advanced AI capabilities with our extensive research expertise, we will significantly enhance our market research offerings. This collaboration enables us to deliver deeper insights, broader perspectives, and more effective solutions to our clients with greater speed and precision,”
Philippe Guinaudeau, CEO of BrandTrends Group.

Challenge

For entertainment, kids and family brands, brand tracking needs to answer a simple question: what is changing in consumers’ minds, and why?

Traditional trackers are effective at measuring awareness, consideration and usage, but they can be more limited when it comes to understanding the reasons behind those movements. Open-ended questions can provide that depth, but they are harder to collect consistently and more time-consuming to analyse at scale.

This becomes even more challenging when consumers may know dozens of brands.

In the BrandTrends questionnaire architecture, respondents can be exposed to up to 65 brands, while deeper evaluation is conducted only on a systematically selected subset of brands they know.

This deeper evaluation can cover:

Brand attitudes and associations
Favorites and preferences
Ownership and usage history
Purchase and consideration intentions
Future planning
Intentions by product category

The challenge is therefore to collect more context for each brand without making the survey longer or more repetitive.

For BrandTrends’ clients, this means being able to understand not only which brands are gaining or losing, but also why, while keeping results comparable across countries, audiences and tracking waves.

The Brand Loop

Instead of asking every respondent the full set of questions for every brand they know, BrandTrends uses a Brand Loop.

The survey first identifies which brands each respondent is aware of, starting with measures such as:

Unaided awareness
Tested awareness

From this individual brand universe, a predefined sampling rule selects a smaller number of brands for deeper evaluation.

The respondent then goes through the same evaluation framework for each selected brand, covering areas such as attitudes, associations, usage and purchase intentions.

This approach allows BrandTrends to collect rich, comparable information across dozens of brands without making the survey excessively long or repetitive.

For entertainment, kids and family companies, the benefit is clear: they can track many competing brands and understand their position in much greater depth, while preserving a manageable respondent experience.

Managing the complexity behind the scenes

The Brand Loop also creates an important data challenge.

If a respondent has no result for a particular brand, it does not necessarily mean they do not know it. The brand may simply not have been selected for deeper evaluation, the question may not have applied, or the respondent may not have reached that part of the survey.

These situations need to remain clearly differentiated to avoid misinterpreting the results.

SmartInterview helps preserve this logic while making the data easier to process and analyse at scale, ensuring that brand comparisons remain reliable across markets, audiences and tracking waves.

Credit photo: Licensing Horizon, Dubaï Hilton Hotel February 25th 2024.

“BrandTrends has always been data-driven, allowing us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how open-ended questions and automated classifications can be leveraged to further strengthen BrandTrends’ position as a leader in delivering unparalleled insights,”
Matthieu Saussaye, CEO of Smartinterview.

Results

The integration focused on creating a richer respondent experience while preserving the structure required by BrandTrends’ existing tracking infrastructure. This made it possible to collect deeper qualitative data, faster and at scale.

By integrating SmartInterview into the tracking process, BrandTrends made open-ended research more engaging for respondents, easier to analyse, and more efficient to operate, without compromising data quality by benefiting from the smartinterview brand loop and tracking methodology.