BRASS Method

Prioritization method for customer acquisition channels choosing

Alexander Sergeev avatar
Written by Alexander Sergeev
Updated over a week ago

BRASS is a specific technique that allows marketing and design specialists to identify the most suitable and convenient ways to attract customers to the company's product (website or application). BRASS prioritization is the original development made by one professional, David Arnoux, and this approach to prioritization has been truly confirmed in practice and makes all the customer acquisition channels be available for their further testing.

The essence of BRASS method

There are two main principles which BRASS system in based on. 

The first is called Socratic method that is named after its creator, famous Greek philosopher Socrates. The fundamental idea of Socratic method lies in a proper dialogue between the opponents, that can give all the necessary conclusions and ideas for every person. It is only important to ask the correctly formulated questions and receive the comprehensive answers to them. 

The second BRASS method principle is the conception of the wisdom of crowds, that was disclosed in the eponymously-named book written by American journalist James Surowiecki. The core of such principle is quite simple: the more people take part in any discussion, the better and more reasonable results will be received in the end.

How BRASS method works

Look at a typical BRASS table below:

As it can be seen, there are some ideas and their brief description about the customer acquisition channels and. every component of BRASS term implies a certain criteria for its evaluation. Every criteria, in its turn, has to be estimated from 1 to 5 points. Further all the criteria will be used during the discussion meetings and votings made by all team members for the final decision.

BRASS stands for the following way:

  • B (Blink) represents a momentary reaction to the idea. Without analyzing and without thinking - that is the meaning of this criterion: a specialist just comes across with a certain thought and realize its attractiveness on the spot. 

  • R (Relevance) is the indicator that allows specialists to evaluate the effectiveness of a channel in the context of the target audience coverage. There is one important question to be asked and answered: is it a real customer channel where your main users live? If the answer is yes, so it is worth keeping this way of customer acquisition in mind. 

  • A (Availability: Ease + Cost) serves as an indicator of the level of difficulty in selecting a certain customer acquisition channel and the amount of time and money spent on setting up such channel. 

  • S (Scalability) allows specialists know the coverage of a customer acquisition channel and its further possible expansion in case of its successful work. 

  • S (Scope) is the total score of all the estimated indicators - usually, each indicator is multiplied with another. In some cases a certain criteria can be appreciated a little bit more than other, for example, the ease of a certain criteria is much more important than its performance terms, so the indicator of ease is doubled.

As a result, the ideas with the highest scores become leaders and are more likely to be realized in practice.


BRASS meeting
 

However, before the implementation of the most appropriate ideas, there are some important meetings that are considered to be traditional for BRASS method, where specialists do the following:

  • come together and start a mutual communication between marketing professionals, designers and a product manager in order to have this notorious ‘wisdom of crowds’

  • in accordance with the second BRASS principle, that is Socratic method, all the meeting members ask each other the right questions and give the right answers in order to find the truthful ideas of customer acquisition channels

  • all the participants have recourse to the relevant situation in the area of customer acquisition channels and pay their attention to every detail during the discussion

  • finally, specialists vote together and choose the best ideas from BRASS table and prepare for their realization.

Hygger recommends

This theme is closely connected with the following theme:

Did this answer your question?