A strong brand is the hallmark of a company’s success. It helps the organization sell better, attract the right talent, and grow profitably. Understanding your brand health is, therefore, crucial for marketers to find out if the business is moving in the right direction and take measures to attune it more closely to customers’ needs.
Brand health measurement can be approached in a variety of ways, consumer surveys and interviews being most common. However, with the advent of digital media and availability of advanced tools, marketers have newer, improved ways to understand, measure, and track brand health on a continual basis. No matter the approach, the following factors are crucial to ensure that you’re measuring your brand’s health against the right metrics.
1. Assess your customers
This is the zero starting point for every brand health study. Understand your market and customer needs first to be able to identify what your business needs to achieve. Get a clear understanding of the customer profile (demographics, segments, etc.), current market size, buying behavior/attitude and purchase drivers, purchase journey, macroeconomic details, and customer expectations.
2. Know your competition
A brand’s competitive position is a major factor impacting its brand health. To determine your competitive position, it is important to perform a competitive intelligence study to identify direct and indirect competitors, their strengths and weakness, geographic presence, network strength, business and engagement models, business units by customer segment, and market share by value.
3. Identify which metrics are key to your brand’s health
The essence of brand health analysis is identifying and quantitatively defining key metrics of brand performance. For example, a well-established company might consider loyalty, network strength, market share, and stakeholder affinity to be crucial, while an emerging company might want to measure its brand in terms of awareness, distribution (depth and width), reputation, and engagement.
4. Finally, benchmark your company against the competition
Based on the insight gathered and metrics identified in the previous steps, design the approach to measure your brand’s health. Find out how you rank when it comes to satisfying the specific needs and expectations that customers have and how you stack up against the competition against those metrics.
5. Continuous measurement is key
Systematically and transparently-implemented brand health analyses is crucial to the company’s success. It’s important to measure brand health on a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis to monitor the brand against real market conditions. Continuous measurement is extremely critical, because it allows you to see the improvement or decline in the parameters mentioned above on a regular basis and take corrective actions in a timely manner.
Research shows that a majority of senior marketing decision makers believe a connected and personalized omnichannel experience is critical to achieving their business objectives. Many feel that proper measurement and improvement actions are critical to their brand’s success and finding the right tools are key to achieving this goal. However, when it comes to measuring brand health, there’s never a one-size-fits-all approach. Each company is different, and so are the factors that contribute to its success. While focus groups, surveys, social media listening, etc. are crucial for in-depth analysis, it’s important to carry out a comprehensive customer and competitive analysis to understand what factors matter most to your brand’s health.
Using a hybrid approach, a global health insurance provider was able to track its brand health in expat health insurance markets across 12 countries. The insights from the study helped their marketing teams align their goals to customer needs and develop customer-focused product offerings. Download the case study to find out more.
