How to Use MRI Simmons Catalyst: Brand Catalyst in Simmons Insights

Brand Catalyst is an advanced brand strategy and predictive segmentation tool. Brand Catalyst helps brand marketers and their agencies understand consumer perception towards their brands using advanced psychographics, intent, category preferences, brand and product consumption patterns. Brand Catalyst also uses advance predictive models to identify potential prospects and their characteristics. A built-in recommendation engine converts all these differentiating attributes (including over 60,000 consumer data points) to create unique consumer personas for a brand

Brand Catalyst is a predictive consumer segmentation and brand strategy tool that helps define brand identity, differentiate against competitors, create unique personas, and drive effective media, creative, and partnership strategies. Brand Catalyst includes 2 key modules:

• Explorer: Pre-formatted insights that highlight unique opportunities for customer retention, prospect acquisition, and category growth.
• Reporter: A deep dive across over thousands of consumer attributes to quickly assess how personas are differentiated from each other.

Step 1: From the "Essentials" menu, select "Catalyst" then “Brand Catalyst”.

Step 2: Select a study. 

Click on the box at the top of the page displaying the selected study. 

Click on the arrow to display the list of available studies. 

Select a study. You will generally want to select the most recent study containing relevant data. You may need to try more than one study.

Step 1: Set your Target

Use the "Smart Search" box to search for your target. This will be a product, brand, or consumer behavior.

Select from the generated list of survey responses. Look carefully to make sure that your selection meets your needs. For example, notice that many brands are divided into specific product categories.

• "BRANDS USE MO" means that consumers indicated that this is the brand that they used most often

• "BRANDS USE ALSO" means that while consumers used this brand, it was not their most used brand

• "BRANDS USE" simply means that the brand was used within the timeframe of the survey

Step 2: Once you have made your selection, click the “Explore” Icon to the right to generate a Profile. 

Select up to 3 Brands, Products, or Consumer Behaviors to compare. Then, click the "Add" Icon. 

For example, we can compare the general profile of consumers of the brands Corona, Guinness, and Heineken. 

Each profile provides various insights into the consumer, such as a General Profile, Other Brands Consumed, Media Consumption, Attitudes on a variety of topics, and general Demographic information. You can also gain additional insight by selecting a topic to learn more specific information related to it. 

Step 3: Read , export and interpret the report.

Reports automatically export in PDF format, so be sure that your report looks correct to you. You may want to consider renaming your columns in order to better view the product names.

Brand Catalyst Reporter enables the user to take a deeper dive across the over 60,000 consumer attributes available in MRI-Simmons, to quickly assess how brands and their personas differentiate from each other.

Clicking on the Reporter icon will open this window, with the personas (differentiated by colors) on the right-hand side and the data dictionary on the left-hand side.

As with Explorer, Reporter allows the user to compare and contrast up to 3 personas using data visualizations on individual questions within the data dictionary. You can use the same personas from an Explorer run or click directly into Reporter and create your personas there using Smart Search.

Reporter enables the user to visualize individual data points, based on the dictionary. Within the dictionary on the left-hand side of the window, the arrows indicate major categories. Click on an arrow to expand the category. Continue this action within any subcategories to get to the red Q (for question) entry. There is also a search box at the top of the dictionary to locate specific data points.

Reports export directly into an Excel Document.