What are the important things to measure about my brand?

There is no single aspect of your brand that is the ‘one thing’ you need measure to understand its health, and to understand how to ensure future success. Of course, it’s critical that a brand generates profit and is the real measure of success, but it doesn’t help you understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind whether you are making money.

There are three golden principles to follow when setting up measurement for your brand:

1. Measure against your objectives

It sounds obvious but if the measures you use don’t connect with your marketing and business objectives how will you know if you’re doing well? You might want to increase penetration with a specific audience, so you need to put measurement in place that tells you if that is happening, or if it is likely to happen, such as gauging consideration and purchase among that particular group, rather than just a nationally representative audience.

2. Be specific

The more specific you are with your measurement the closer you will get to understanding if you are to achieving your objectives and what is driving performance. For example, it’s nice if general awareness of your brand is growing but is much better to understand if your brand is thought first of when a relevant moment occurs in your audience’s life that will cause them to buy from your category. To give an extreme example, I’m aware of Ferrari as a brand, but that doesn’t mean it will be on my consideration list next time I buy a car!

3. Take a holistic view

This is arguably the most important part of understanding the health of your brand. To avoid being tripped up by a blind spot it’s critical to have a rounded view of what is influencing the performance of your brand now and what may do in the future.

At CreativeRace we have an holistic approach to understanding the position a brand is in now, and where it could be in the future that we call Brand Health Mapping.

Brand Health Mapping harnesses a wide variety of data sources, and the expertise of our Data Analytics and Brand Strategy teams, to uncover the current drivers and limiters of growth for your brand, and the opportunities for the future.

We dig into four areas to truly understand your brand and its environment and for each of these generate a score.

1. Context – We begin by examining the broad context around your brand and its category. We dig into the societal and cultural trends that could influence your audience, their buying behaviour, and what is driving the overall category’s performance.
2. Audience – we uncover the needs or attitudes they hold that shape their relationship with category, and how they buy.
3. Competition – Focusing in on your brand’s category we interrogate the competition, both known and those that could be currently unknown. We analyse what competitor brands offer your audience, how they communicate, and how are performing in comparison with your brand.
4. Brand – We uncover how your brand is perceived by its audience, asses how well it is communicating with them and dig into the buying behaviour of current customers.

We then identify the drivers and limiters of success for your brand and work with you to use them to shape ongoing strategy.