Alida is a powerful platform designed to help teams run agile research, quickly gather consumer feedback, and make real-time decisions. For brand positioning work – such as testing new messaging, evaluating brand territories, or refining your brand story – Alida gives users efficient access to key insights. But even the strongest platform can’t guarantee strategic success.

That’s because brand positioning is more than just opinions or preferences – it involves understanding emotional resonance, competitive differentiation, and long-term brand narratives. Without the experience to interpret these layers correctly, teams risk drawing the wrong conclusions from seemingly straightforward responses.

Where Things Start to Slip

Brand positioning research in Alida often goes off track due to one or more of the following reasons:

• Lack of clear strategic guardrails: Teams launch tests before having a solid understanding of what they want to learn – or how those learnings align with long-term brand goals.
• Over-reliance on surface-level data: Alida’s accessible dashboards and metrics are useful, but they don’t tell the full story around consumer behavior and emotion.
• Misinterpretation of emotional feedback: Responses in open ends or emotion-based questions may be taken at face value, rather than analyzed in context.
• Testing too much at once: Positioning research tends to fall apart when too many ideas are crammed into one survey, making results hard to untangle.

The Role of Strategic Oversight

Without experienced guidance, DIY brand positioning tests can produce insights that are technically correct – but strategically off-base. For example, a message may score high on likability but fail to build distinctiveness in a competitive market. Or, a “winning” creative direction might resonate in the short term while undermining long-term brand equity.

This is where On Demand Talent becomes a critical solution. These professionals bring deep experience using tools like Alida while staying laser-focused on business objectives. From aligning research questions with real business goals to evaluating how findings map back to your brand story, expert support helps make sure your insights are not just interesting – but actionable.

When used thoughtfully, Alida can be a valuable tool in a brand’s research toolkit. But that success depends on more than platform access – it depends on well-structured studies, expert interpretation, and insight that ties back to broader marketing strategy.

As more teams turn to DIY research tools like Alida, it becomes easier to launch quick tests and gather market data without having to go through a traditional agency. This shift has empowered insights teams to work faster, test more iteratively, and stretch limited budgets. But testing brand positioning in a DIY tool is far from plug-and-play – especially when you're evaluating complex ideas like brand territories or emotional response.

Here are some of the most common problems teams encounter when testing brand ideas in Alida or similar insight tools – and how to avoid them.

1. Misreading Emotional Response

Emotional resonance is foundational to brand positioning. But it's also one of the hardest things to interpret in DIY platforms. Tools like Alida may offer emojis, heat maps, or sentiment coding – but they can’t always explain why someone feels a certain way. Without expert interpretation, teams can over-index on positive or negative sentiment without understanding the emotional drivers behind them.

2. Confusing or Overloaded Messaging Tests

When testing different brand messages, it's tempting to pack in variations, visuals, taglines, and detailed copy all in one go. Unfortunately, this often dilutes clarity. Respondents feel overwhelmed or unsure what exactly they’re reacting to – which leads to unreliable feedback. Simpler, more focused message testing often reveals deeper insights.

3. Misalignment with Brand Strategy

Not every test is a good test. One of the biggest risks with DIY tools is launching research that doesn’t connect to overall brand strategy. If brand positioning tests don’t reflect your brand purpose, competitive differentiators, or customer expectations, then results – no matter how clear – won’t help your strategy move forward.

4. Volume Without Depth

DIY research tools make it easy to run high volumes of tests, but that can come at the expense of depth. You might get quantitative scores for many options, but without richer qualitative input, it’s hard to know why something performs well or how to improve it. That’s where expert researchers can design hybrid studies or layered approaches to deliver both breadth and depth in feedback.

How On Demand Talent Bridges the Gap

SIVO’s On Demand Talent acts as a strategic partner to help teams not just use platforms like Alida, but get the most out of them. These experienced market research professionals can:

• Design smarter studies that match brand and business goals
• Interpret emotional feedback with clarity and context
• Tailor message testing for cleaner, more meaningful outputs
• Guide teams in aligning research results with brand story and strategy

Rather than relying only on internal teams or freelancers, brands can tap into highly skilled professionals who specialize in using DIY tools the right way. That means better insights, less guesswork, and more confidence in your brand positioning decisions.

Alida is a powerful DIY research tool that allows you to gather rapid consumer feedback on brand messages, positioning territories, and storytelling elements. But when it comes to testing emotional resonance and story clarity, many teams struggle to pull out insights rich enough to drive strategic decisions. Here’s how to make your tests more effective – and avoid common DIY missteps.

Why Emotional Resonance Matters

When you're testing brand positioning, the emotional connection your message creates can be just as important as the words themselves. Consumers often make decisions based on feelings, even if they rationalize them later. Emotional resonance helps you understand how well your story evokes the intended response – such as trust, excitement, empowerment, or nostalgia.

Challenges of Measuring Emotion in DIY Tools

Alida offers ways to collect open-ended responses, ratings, and qualitative feedback – but interpreting that feedback through the lens of emotional impact requires care. Beginners often make the mistake of pulling emotional terms at face value without context. For example, if multiple responses say something is “confusing,” what exactly was unclear – the tone, the purpose, or a word choice?

In addition, DIY tools typically lack built-in sentiment or emotion analysis, forcing researchers to manually interpret each response or plug data into external analytics platforms – a process prone to bias and misinterpretation if done without expertise.

Tips for Better Testing in Alida

• Use projective techniques: Ask participants to imagine how they would describe the brand to a friend after seeing your message. This reveals emotional tone in a more natural way.
• Include visual or tonal scales: Instead of only asking “Do you like this message?”, use feeling-based rating scales showing emotional reactions (e.g., “This message makes me feel…” with options like inspired, bored, skeptical).
• Test against personas or territories: Instead of isolating one message, place it within the context of a brand territory to see which story aligns best with a target persona’s values.

Making Story Clarity Measurable

Clear storytelling is essential for effective positioning. In Alida, test story clarity by asking a mix of direct and inferred questions – such as “What is this brand trying to communicate?” followed by “How easy was this to understand?” Allowing participants to explain in their own words reveals gaps between intended and perceived messages.

A fictional example: a fitness brand tests two versions of its hero message. Message A receives strong emotional feedback but unclear descriptions of the brand’s offering. Message B scores lower in emotion but gets more consistent interpretations. This may signal a need to combine emotional language from A with clarity structures from B – a nuanced insight that often takes trained eyes to spot.

One of the biggest risks in using any DIY research tool – even sophisticated solutions like Alida – is disconnecting the research from business strategy. Without strategic alignment, the data you collect may be interesting, but not actionable. That’s where On Demand Talent plays a critical role.

DIY Tools Need Human Strategy Filters

DIY platforms are fast and flexible, but they don’t interpret data or ask the right strategic questions on your behalf. To align consumer feedback with brand strategy, experienced insights professionals help translate tactical outputs into brand-moving decisions.

For example, in brand positioning research using Alida, an insights expert can evaluate whether you’re testing the right positioning territories from a market differentiation perspective. They can spot when your “breakthrough new messaging” sounds just like the competition – something automated tools won’t flag.

How On Demand Talent Adds Strategic Value

SIVO’s On Demand Talent brings in seasoned consumer insights experts, ready to integrate seamlessly with your team and your tech stack. Here’s how they help protect strategy alignment during DIY studies:

• Design smarter research: Framing your Alida study to align with long-term brand goals, customer journeys, and competitive white space.
• Interpret findings with context: Going beyond surface-level reactions to link participant feedback to brand principles, values, or mission.
• Spot trends, not just preferences: Identifying shifts in how customers interpret your messaging – including emotional and cultural cues you might miss internally.
• Elevate internal decisions: Equipping your CMO or brand leads with clear storytelling around the research that reinforces strategic choices, not just isolated insights.

Just as you wouldn’t build a marketing campaign using only AI-driven copy without review, you wouldn’t set your brand direction using raw sentiment data alone. On Demand Talent ensures the research narrative supports your brand blueprint – helping you make confident, strategic calls.

DIY research tools like Alida are reshaping how teams access and act on insights – providing autonomy, speed, and cost-efficiency. But when the stakes are high, bringing in external expertise can be the difference between surface-level feedback and decision-ready insight.

Key Moments to Bring in Expert Support

Knowing when to augment your research efforts is a strategic move, not a fallback. Here are signs it might be time to bring in On Demand Talent:

• Your team lacks bandwidth or specific expertise – and projects are being rushed or deprioritized as a result.
• Your data isn’t tying back to strategy – and leadership is struggling to act on the insights you collect.
• You’re testing big bets – such as new positioning territories, brand relaunches, or emotionally charged concepts that require deeper interpretation.
• The feedback is confusing or contradictory – and your team isn’t sure how to resolve tensions in the data.
• You want to level-up internal capabilities – and need an expert to model best practices or train the team while executing.

Freelancers, Agencies, or On Demand Talent?

There are many ways to seek support, including insights freelancers or agency partners. But On Demand Talent offers a unique middle ground – bringing you flexible, embedded experts who act as part of your team, without the long onboarding or cost of traditional hiring models.

Unlike freelancers who may bring varied experience, On Demand Talent from SIVO are highly vetted professionals with years of experience across industries and research types. You gain immediate access to talent who understands how to use tools like Alida effectively for positioning tests, message testing, and emotional resonance analysis.

Future-Proofing Your Research Investment

Integrating expert support doesn’t just fix short-term problems – it builds long-term value. Talent can help your team get more out of your existing tools, standardize best practices, and strengthen the narrative around research that garners executive buy-in. In essence, they help your DIY research work harder for your brand.