Your brand is one of your company’s most valuable intangible assets but how well are you measuring and monitoring both its impact and success?
Having a clear understanding around the value and performance of your brand is the only way you can be sure it’s working for the business. We come across far too many companies who create brand identities based on what they feel is right for the business and their clients. However your brand perception and how it’s positioned could be completely at odds with this approach, resulting in the alienation of clients - instead of their engagement. Left unchecked poor brand performance always result in poor business performance.
We help companies unlock potential value and equity in their brands with a focus on improving company performance. We do this by developing a clear measurement framework around relevant KPI’s and metrics, allowing a business to effectively measure and monitor the impact their brands bring or indeed don’t bring to the business; we call this a measurement framework.
Our framework helps a company measure their brand across 3 levels
1. Behaviour: how your clients, employees, customers and investors are engaging and connecting with the brand and the resulting level of brand advocacy.
2. Perception and positioning: how you are perceived in your marketplace, your positioning and how your clients view you.
3. Performance and value: the gained value to the business around the strategic initiatives the brand is supporting.
1.Measuring behaviour
Measuring behaviour is understanding how your stakeholders are living the brand. Essentially if you don’t know what your stakeholders are thinking and feeling about your brand, you can’t effectively market to them or communicate with them.
To understand behaviour, you need to look at what your stakeholders are actively doing. For example, measuring their loyalty and advocacy: are employees recommending your brand to friends and family? Are clients referring your business? Are investors investing more in you or your competitors? Are they providing feedback, are you listening? Are you providing accessible channels for them to feedback?
2.Measuring perception
Measuring perception is the understanding how stakeholders feel about your business, it’s your reputation and how you are compared to your peers. The aim is to understand what people really believe and feel in relation to your brand. Drawing out and understanding these emotional connections will expose how the brand is perceived and positioned against other companies with a similar proposition.
Questions around measuring perception may include: Why do you choose to work with the company, would you recommend them and why? Describe words and attributes that come to mind when you think of the company and its brand.? If the brand was a person, who would it be?
In a world of hyper-connectivity, companies have more channels to access, which makes it easier to listen and understand what stakeholders are saying about the company.
3.Measuring performance
To effectively measure brand performance it’s important to understand what it’s delivering to the business. The strategic business drivers or triggers where your brand really needs to perform such as a merger or acquisition, high churn or low engagement among employees, a new direction or international expansion, or low sales are all areas that brand can support.
Measuring brand performance needs to be a continual process. If you are constantly listening and monitoring the impact of your brand is making to your business you can make the necessary changes and adapt and be agile to changes such as new competition, new channels, reputational damage. Left unmonitored and unmeasured brands are unlikely to evolve and become disconnected and poor performing often leading to an expensive rebrand or repositioning which can take months to land.
The KPI’s for measuring performance will vary for each business but are likely to include: business achievements, sales, retention, loyalty and advocacy. Other areas that drive and improve performance such as sustainability activities, employee engagement scores, vision and values alignment are just some of the areas we can help you monitor.
The more you measure and monitor the more robust and sustainable your brand will be.