“What gets measured gets managed”-Peter Drucker.
What’s the one thing common between a brand and your body?
You don’t think about both unless you hit bottom. Only when you encounter breathing issues or swelling in your hands – in short, hit the bump, you try to reverse your lifestyle and bring changes to bring your life back to normal.
The same happens with a brand. When you see happy customers and growing bank reserves, you rarely think about acknowledging the alternatives. Just like your body, your brand requires regular check-ups to understand what’s cooking underneath.
Only then can you build a successful brand and not be among the nine out of ten startups that fail.
Measuring your brand could be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business.
But it’s easier said than done. 
It’s easy to measure sales and marketing campaigns as it revolves around metrics and reports to show what’s going to work and what’s not. Brand measurement depends on an array of intangible factors such as recognition, awareness, perception, loyalty, etc.
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How to Measure Your Brand to Make the Most of Your Business?
Your brand reflects your business’s real value and helps in finding the source of sustained competitive advantage. As a result, brand measurement is no longer a choice. We’ve listed three ways of measuring your brand to make the most of your business.
1. Brand awareness
When ordering a soft drink, do you ask for cola or Coke? What do you say when you want a photocopy of a document? Photocopy or Xerox? What do you ask the chemist about cutting your finger? Plastic bandage or Band-Aid?
That’s the type of awareness every brand should strive to achieve. The brands are so popular that they’ve conveniently replaced the generic terms with their product.
Brand awareness is the extent by which your potential customers recognize your brand with the associated products and services. It’s the much-needed fuel for bringing new leads, converting them to customers and brand ambassadors. In short, it’s that part of the business that customers trust. Brand awareness also places the brand ahead of the competition.
Ways to measure brand awareness
- Measure and study the direct and referral traffic through web analytics
- Measure all social media activities through social listening tools.
- Track the success of your backlinks.
- Survey and interview customers.
- Search the popularity of your brand and products through Google Trends.
- Track your brand on review sites like Yelp, Google, and Yellow Pages.
Example: Burger King, through their brand and product awareness campaign, encouraged customers to download their app and travel within 600 feet of any McDonald’s restaurant. On doing so, the customer immediately received a deal on their phone. The campaign was successful, and it drove 1.5 million new app downloads and created a buzz on social media platforms.
2. Brand Recognition
What’s the first thing which comes to your mind when you look at Coca-Cola?
It’s the eye-catching red and white logo.
This is brand recognition as the potential customers, or target audience can easily ‘recognize’ your brand. Beyond the brand name, a memorable logo, perfect color scheme, appealing visual elements, and tone of voice that your customers can relate to your brand.
Brand recognition is an ingredient or subset of brand awareness. With brand name recognition not reserved for only Apple, Coca-Cola, or Google, developing brand recognition takes time.
According to research, it takes between 5-7 impressions before a customer remembers a brand.
But how to measure brand recognition?
You can do it through:
Unprompted brand recall: This method involves asking the target audience questions without initial prompting or dropping hints. For example, if you manufacture and market soaps,
- Ask your target audience to name the first soap brand that comes to their mind?
- Now, divide the number of people who named your brand by the number of people you questioned.
- Compare these figures with your competitors, and the last time you asked the same question.
- Based on the results, you can tweak a marketing campaign to increase brand recognition.
Prompted brand recall: Unlike unprompted brand recall, here, you prompt the audience with your brand name. For example, if you manufacture and market soaps,
- From a list of 5-10 brands, ask the target audience to choose brands they’ve heard of. Remember to include the brand’s name in the list.
- Calculate the proportion of people who recognize your brand.
- Based on the figures, boost your brand recognition strategy.
Example: Verizon developed a brand recognition campaign ‘Can you hear me now?’ around a fictional character called ‘Test Man,’ representing the real group of Verizon employees. These employees drove more than 100,000 miles each per year to test the reliability of Verizon’s network. The campaign helped the company increase its market share because millions of customers could recognize the brand through the tagline ‘Can you hear me now’. The customer churn rate dropped by a whopping 1.8%.
3. Brand Equity
Consider the most successful brands in the world –and what they mean to the customers.
Porsche develops luxurious and reliable vehicles for a seamless experience.
Apple is renowned for continually innovating new technologies and coming up with outstanding phones, tablets, computers, and TV.
Starbucks has supreme customer-service written all over apart from providing world-class coffee.
When customers consider these products or services, they know the product or service would be reliable if it’s from Porsche. It’ll be innovative if it’s from Apple, and the service would be supreme if it’s from Starbucks.
This perceived value that a brand creates in the eyes of the customer is called brand equity.
It can both be positive or negative. The above examples represent companies with positive brand equity. Oil and gas giant BP lost significant brand equity after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.
Measuring brand equity is critical as these help build a strong brand, and customers don’t hesitate to pay a premium price for the product or service.
Ways of measuring brand equity:
- Preference metrics: It helps in measuring your brand’s competitive advantage in the market. For measuring the preference metrics, consider the following factors:
- Ability to provide a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to the customers. Companies with high brand relevance have at least one USP, which distinguishes them from their competitors.
- Ability to reach the target market and provide the intended value
- Ability to create an emotional connection with the audience.
- How much value your brand creates in comparison to the value your customer gets in return.
When you combine these factors together, you accurately rank your company among the competitors. It helps you understand where you stand and what you can do to outclass the competitors.
- Financial metrics: As the name suggests, it analyzes your company’s financial health and compares it with the competitors. In short, you get to know the monetary value of your brand. Measure the following metrics for understanding the brand’s financial health.
- Market share: Percentage of overall share earned by your brand in your industry and target market.
- Average Transaction Value (ATV): The amount your customers spend with your brand on a single transaction.
- Price premium: The brand’s ability to keep the prices higher than average for your products and services.
- Growth rate: Brand’s ability to scale up operations as revenue increases.
Example: According to Forbes, the brand value of Apple is $205 billion. It’s the brand value and not the company’s value. The brand value is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with Apple’s products and software. It also takes into account the buying experience. Although Apple products offer products similar to other Smartphone manufacturing companies, their USP, customer loyalty, premium pricing, and demand sets it apart from the competition.
Conclusion
Measuring a brand is not about vanity metrics or fancy graphs – it’s about measuring the intangible asset to bring success to your business. It tries to capture the behavior of your target audience towards your brand.
In an increasingly growing and competitive landscape, you need the right insights and industry understanding to gain the upper hand over the competitors. By evaluating and measuring the brand’s awareness, recognition, and equity, you glean through useful insights, come up with new campaigns, and use the results to compare the next campaign’s results.
Use these brand performance measures to create a successful campaign that exponentially grows your brand, makes sales, and keeps the customers happy.
Start measuring the performance of your brand today for a brighter future tomorrow!
