A Guide to Effective Brand Measurement
While brand marketing has many variables at play, it is possible to build your brand while holding your investment accountable.
To successfully manage and grow your company, it's important to understand how your decisions impact both your brand and financial performance.
Brand marketing, the process of shaping consumers' mental profiles of your brand, can be difficult to measure. However, there are numerous advantages to development a measurement framework:
Better aligns brand strategy with business strategy to drive commercial growth.
Identifies growth opportunities and uncovers weaknesses in your current strategy.
Measures the effectiveness of your marketing allowing you to allocate resources more efficiently.
Allows you to learn more about your customers’ perceptions and behaviour leading to more effective messaging and marketing strategies.
Helps you stay ahead of competitors as regular brand measurement keeps you informed about category, cultural, and market trends.
Before any measurement program is developed, it’s important to ask:
What brand marketing problem is the initiative solving?
Is that problem worth solving?
Is the creative addressing the problem worth solving?
Do we have an adequate media budget to support the creative?
Once these questions are answered, you can establish a clear link between your program’s objectives and your measurement of success.
As Peter Drucker famously said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."
Brand measurement not only quantifies your brand's performance but also provides evidence of its value to both internal and external stakeholders.
The metrics you choose should align with your business type and brand strategy. Typically, brand measurement programs include metrics across four key areas:
Perceptual: focuses on what people think of your brand.
Behavioural: focuses on how people interact with your brand.
Purchase: focuses on how people purchase and use your brand.
Financial: evaluates the brand's impact on your bottom line.
Brand measurement starts with defining your goals and identifying the specific problem your brand marketing aims to solve, which is typically one of four core business outcomes:
Awareness (Aided & Unaided)
Salience & Perception (Internal & External)
Consideration
Purchase Intent
Keep in mind that some of these indicators require a longer-term perspective, particularly those related to changing deeply entrenched consumer perceptions or building a brand from scratch.
Each indicator has its unique impact horizon:
Purchase Intent: short-term impact, usually within 180 days.
Consideration: mid-term impact, spanning 9-12 months.
Awareness (Aided & Unaided): long-term impact, stretching from 15-24 months.
Salience & Perception (Internal & External): often specific to large companies, with a long-term impact horizon ranging from 2-5 years.
Before defining brand success indicators, it’s important to do everything you can to ensure you will have something worth measuring, and set realistic expectations within your company (especially if your company is new to brand marketing).
Various methods, such as brand tracking, brand lift, brand equity, and brand research, can measure these indicators and assess brand performance. Ultimately, the goal is to understand the relationship between brand metrics and their impact on commercial outcomes like revenue, market share, and profitability.
Understanding the value of brand is essential for any company wanting to drive growth, and we're here to help bridge that knowledge gap.
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