Whether developing a new product or launching a new marketing campaign, understanding your customers’ true attitudes is crucial to brand management. The main aim is to make predictions about consumers’ behaviour in the future. So, for example, if we wish to make a change to one of our products, we need to conduct research that will help us predict whether the change will bring about an increase sales, decrease sales, or make no difference to sales. However, it is important to choose the correct way to measure people’s thoughts, emotions, or gut-instincts towards your brand, depending on what you’d like to achieve.

There are five recognised ways to measure attitudes in market research.