Brand KPIs and Strategy Template
What is a Brand?
Brand is a perceived value of a product or service. It starts with a visual style but is translated throughout all activities of the organization.
- On the company side, the brand can be broken down into specific brand promises.
- On the customer side, the brand’s perception will be different across different stakeholders.
Who are the stakeholders of the brand?
- End users, of course (we can categorize them further)
- Company’s partners
- Internal stakeholders: employees, top management, talent manager, brand manager
- Shareholders, Press, Investors, Competitors, etc.
Respectively, when measuring the brand, we need to understand what brand promise we are talking about and who are the stakeholders.
5 Steps to Measure a Brand for SMB
Here is a quick plan on how a small and medium-sized business can approach brand measurement.
- Quantify general brand awareness (see the details below)
- Describe brand promises
- Define the stakeholders of brand
- Match brand promise and stakeholder
- Quantify brand coherence
- Improve based on the findings
Brand/Stakeholder Matrix
A simple stakeholders/brand matrix would help a lot in understanding what each brand promise actually means for different stakeholders and how to quantify this very aspect of the brand for this very stakeholder.
Here is an example of such a matrix:
| Stakeholders\Brand promise | Being a great place to work | Excellent customer service | Reliable product |
| Employees | We are allowed to work remotely Metric: employee satisfaction, % | We are equipped with an omni channel customer support tool Metric: tools availability satisfaction, % | Do QA seriously Metric: the # of near miss reports |
| End-users | The company’s team is always ready to help me Metric: response quality, % | The company answer fast even if we leave a comment on YouTube video Metric: response time, % | Bugs are solved quickly Metric: time to solve critical problems |
| Partners | The company’s team is stable Metric: top performers retention, % | Even if there is some problem, the company solves it quickly Metric: customer service reliability, % | The company’s product is easy to maintain. We can build-in their solution into our product. Metric: maintainability, % |
| Brand manager | Our brand helps us to hire talents faster | We value the time of our clients | We do a high quality product, and here is what it means in your case… |
I’m not adding brand awareness to the table (we discuss it below) because it is something that any brand wants to achieve and the approaches to quantifying awareness are similar for different stakeholders.
Why Do We Want to Measure Brand?
Before discussing specific brand metrics, we need to ask a fundamental question:
- Why do we want to measure brand?
In the case of SMB brand, the best answer is:
- Learn how our stakeholders feel about what we offer and improve something in the company, product, customer service or marketing message
What Are We Going to Do with the Results?
The action plan about all the findings of brand measurement is to analyze the situation and plan some improvements accordingly.
To plan any improvements, we need to know a starting point or a baseline – this will be our own historical data or relevant information about the competitors.
Brand Awareness Metrics
Brand awareness refers to the brand recognition and recalling. The Wikipedia article summarizes some general approaches, but let’s focus on what we can use in a case of SMB company.
How can we measure brand awareness among end-users?
By doing some independent surveys. For example, in a case of BSC Designer, we could survey 100 strategists from different companies (that’s a realistic number for an off-line conference), and ask them what software solutions for strategy execution they have heard about.
That’s a realistic option, but it had certain potential issues:
- Those 100 conference delegates will be just a small part of the potential market, and those are not necessary for your potential clients
- It is costly, as to get a high participation rate, organizers of the event would need to invest in something more engaging than a before-event email survey
What about other stakeholders of the brand? The brand awareness metrics will be similar with certain adjustments. For example, in the case of our internal team, we are interested that the team would know how exactly we plan to deliver our brand promises; in this case, measuring strategy awareness level is a good idea.
Proxies of Brand Awareness
What are easier ways to measure brand awareness?
Brand Searches Metric
Track the number of monthly searches for the brand name in search engines. This data is not that detailed now, but at least you can have some general understanding and compare your product against the competitors.
Backlinks Metric
Track the number of incoming backlinks. The general number of backlinks won’t tell you a lot, analyze the links and count those that come from editorial content. This can be combined with other SEO initiatives discussed before.
Direct Traffic Metric
Look at the direct website traffic. It’s another indication of how your brand works.
Social Trust Metrics
Comparison lists presence. Is your company listed in the relevant comparison lists? For example, in the case of BSC Designer, there are a number of independent websites that reviewed the Balanced Scorecard software, and we are glad to be listed there. It indicates a certain level of brand awareness (at least for the editors of the website), and it also works as other social trust signals for potential buyers as well as for the search engines.
The Relevance of Brand Awareness
In my opinion, the problem with brand awareness is that higher awareness not necessarily aligned with brand promises. It doesn’t necessarily lead to better user experience or more sales revenue…
The exaggerated examples:
- Think about a software solution that is promoted across all possible channels and for the most costly keywords on Google Ads – the awareness metric is high, but what message is actually translated to target users in this way? “We are the solution for any problem?” I doubt anyone will really trust this today.
- Think about those ads that interrupt your YouTube video, I’m sure you remembered the name of the brand, but what kind of emotions do you now have about them?
This leads us to the next metric.
Metrics of Brand Coherence
These metrics indicate the gap between the brand promises and the actual perception of the brand.
A car renting company can say a lot about how reliable they are, but some experiences caused by bad customer service will quickly ruin this brand value.
How to measure brand coherence? We need to quantify two things:
- The brand values
- The actual brand perception
Following up with car renting as an example. If the value is being reliable, then we can quantify it by the Service provided as expected, % metric. The baseline for the green zone for this metric should be somewhere at 98%. Any lower value is a sign of brand misalignment.
What metrics can help to measure brand alignment?
Social Engagement Metrics
Content likes and shares, social mentions. Brand is a lot about emotional engagement, so if your content is getting likes and shares, it’s a good sign. Don’t forget to categorize the interactions by positive and negative.
Newsletter Open Rate
Newsletter open rate, %. Everyone gets hundreds of email communications monthly from different companies. Some go directly to the trash bin, other are opened every time or carefully stored in a separate folder in your Gmail account. You read emails from those brands that you trust, that are proven to deliver some useful info regularly.
Review Metrics
Positive or negative review metric. Even the strongest brands receive negative reviews (see the problems reported with Tesla cars or Apple phone), but those companies know how to learn from those reviews.
Returning Customer Metric
If people come back to you, then it’s a good indicator of the trust your product has gained. Or at least it is an indicator that you do better than your competitors.
Brand Value Metrics
Understanding brand value might be interesting in terms of calculating brand ROI, but frankly speaking, I don’t see how brand value metrics will help us with the challenges mentioned above in the ¨Why do we measure brand” chapter. Anyway, let me share some thoughts on this.
Brand investment, $
A rough estimation of everything we invested in the brand.
What should be counted?
Anything that impacts the image of your business. The calculations are actually not that obvious. We can count the costs of brand style design and probably the donations to the sports team, but the rest of activities will overlap with traditional marketing a lot. Take event participation as an example. You can do it for brand awareness, but there are things that are more tangible and measurable.
Premium Price Metric
They say that one of the benefits of having a strong brand is the possibility to set a premium price, the price that is higher than the competitors with weaker brands. I do agree; that’s one of the indicators of the strong brand. But there are obviously other examples that go against this logic.
Let’s take local Vueling airlines, they position themselves as low-cost (no premium price), but they definitely have a strong brand. The part of this brand is their consistent visual design, but it is much more about providing certain services.
Brand Manager Strategy
Having in mind the challenges that we have discussed, we can create a strategy map template for a brand manager (this is now available as a template for all BSC Designer Online accounts).
Financial Perspective
What financial results does our brand help us to achieve?
- Ensure long-term financial growth
Customer Perspective
What do our stakeholders expect from our company?
- Formulate brand promises for all stakeholders
- Ensure brand coherence
Internal Perspective
How can we satisfy the expectations of the stakeholders?
- Map touchpoints with stakeholders
- Check alignment between brand promises and actual behaviours
- Suggest improvement directions for the team
Learning and Growth Perspective
How do we innovate in the context of brand management?
- Establish effective brand communication infrastructure
- Analyze emerging stakeholder needs
- Suggest new skills required to deliver brand promises
Ultimate Brand KPI
What’s the ultimate KPIs for a brand manager? Sales revenue, of course!
https://bit.ly/3uk0ab8
How To Measure Brand Awareness
Brand awareness describes the extent to which customers, prospects and the general public are able to recognize and recall a brand.
It is the first step in engaging potential customers/clients and is often the most crucial. Measuring brand awareness, noting how readily the brand comes to mind and monitoring how this changes over time can be a very effective way of measuring the overall health of a brand.
During a typical brand tracking study, brand awareness is measured in 3 different ways:
- First mention (or “top-of-mind” recall)
- Spontaneous recall
- Prompted recognition
Measures of spontaneous brand recall
The first two are open questions where the respondent is invited to write down the names of brands they are aware of. It is extremely important to make sure that the respondent is clear on exactly what product/service category you want them to answer for. It is usually a good idea to include a brief description of the category first in order to make sure.
Example:
Q1. When thinking about manufacturers of industrial vacuum cleaners (vacuum cleaners designed for use in the workplace, including construction sites, factories and workshops), which is the first brand that comes to mind?
____________________
Q2. Can you name any other manufacturers of industrial vacuum cleaners?
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
- _________
You can well imagine that if you just asked about manufacturers of vacuum cleaners you might get a very different list of brands.
Making it onto the list of brands recalled shows that the association between the brand and the product/service category is strong in the respondent’s mind. Being the first brand that comes to mind in a product category is a huge advantage, as it shows that your brand dominates the association with that product/service category.
Even just making it onto the list of brands recalled is an important step. In most studies, respondents will only recall an average of about 3-4 brands (although this can be higher when talking to specialists).
This explains why competition for headspace is often fierce, as winning a spot on someone’s shortlist generally means knocking another brand off.
Measuring prompted awareness
he third type of awareness is measured differently. The respondent is presented with a list of brands and asked to identify those they are familiar with. Ideally brands should be shown as they are seen in the market, with the logo appropriate to the market you are surveying.
This measure is much less powerful as an indicator of association with the product/service category being tested but is an important part of the larger picture of brand health.
Example:
Q3. And from the list below, which other brands of industrial vacuum cleaner manufacturers you have heard of…
- Dust Control
- Faip
- Ghibli & Wirbel
- Kärcher
- Kirby
- Nielco
- Nilfisk
- Numatic
Comparing spontaneous recall and prompted awareness
- Brands with high levels of spontaneous recall and prompted awareness are generally market leaders.
- Brands displaying relatively high levels of spontaneous recall but low levels of prompted awareness are typically specialist brands who might be industry leaders for a sub-category of product or service. An example might be the leading manufacturer of ride-on vacuum cleaners.
- Brands with high prompted awareness but low spontaneous recall typically fall into two categories:
- Marquee/crossover brands, those who are better known for products/services in other categories
- Defunct brands who are still recognized despite not being a big player anymore
Brands with low scores for both are generally weak but may be an emerging player. This is one of the reasons it is important to track these measures over time
https://bit.ly/3u8RZhR
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