How do I measure brand success?
SHORT READ
To understand how to measure brand success, we first need to know what we mean by brand and the psychology behind human emotional and rational behaviours.
To build and maintain a successful brand, it needs to connect with its audience and mean more to people. In return, it generates money, loyalty and advocacy.
Brand or branding is a word that is often misused as a blanket term for anything related to design or visual. The Dictionary of Brand defines brand as “a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organisation.” The word ‘perception’ is critical here. Brand is intangible and lies in the mind of the beholder. So, the opinion of a brand therefore differs from person to person. This is why measuring brand success needs to consider a broad sample of opinion as well as hard data and statistics.
To build and maintain a successful brand, it needs to connect with its audience and mean more to people. In return, it generates money, loyalty and advocacy.
Let’s start with the things that are easier to measure, which can define brand success. Analysis of the competitive landscape gives a strong indication of how a brand is influencing buying habits or customer behaviours. Look at the following areas against your competitors to define how successful you are in the market:
- Revenue
- Market share
- Number of customers/users
- Repeat transactions
- Website traffic
- Social media followers
- Google rankings
This is all data that can be easy to find on the internet or through conducting market research. However, data and statistics only paint half the picture of brand success.
Brand perception and brand awareness are harder to measure in terms of gathering binary results, but by applying the science of human understanding with modern technology we are now able to gauge areas where a brand may be succeeding or failing.
There are many key drivers that measure people’s emotional and rational responses to brand. Some emotional factors include aspiration, empathy, integrity and transparency. Product performance, differentiation, value for money and ease of access are all rational factors. By conducting market research based on these factors, we can analyse precisely what is driving a brand’s ‘pull and push’ performance. The power of a brand’s proposition is its pull performance, and the strength of a brand’s activation is its push performance.
Qualitative feedback from market research is also important to further enrich brand guidance.
Pull and push performance can also be measured against a competitor set to define how successful your brand is in the market. We can analyse marketing/advertising campaigns, design concepts and brand communications over time to see which emotional or rational drivers a brand needs to improve on to be more successful in the future. Qualitative feedback from market research is also important to further enrich brand guidance.
At Nalla, we bake brand effectiveness measures into every project and work with our clients to build objective criteria that we use to direct and judge our brand identities, campaigns or brand communications.
If you’re interested in finding out how your brand is currently performing, we can provide you with documented brand touchpoint analysis and comprehensive market positioning analysis. This defines a brand equity score and brand competitiveness ratings. We then leave you with an actionable brand brief that highlights the areas of opportunity and improvement.
Related content
Inherited a Brand? How to Evolve It Without Losing Equity
How to talk to the next generation without losing everyone else
How to Write an RFP That Actually Gets You Bold Work
The Riskiest Thing Your Brand Can Do Is Play It Safe
