acovilla

Note: This text is a small section of a course book written for Marketing Analytics students in online M.Sc. degrees.

Introduction

Brands permeate every aspect of our life as one of the most effective ways of recognising and understanding many of the things we use and do every day. Their ubiquity makes them one of the most critical aspects of any human enterprise and they represent the value of a product or service. The building blocks of brands are a set of assets that are tangible or intangible, distinctive, and essential, and their purpose is to make the product or service more desirable, memorable, and different from its competitors, to create economic value.

How do you build valuable brands?

In the same way organizations or individuals own an asset to generate economic value in a market, brands are also composed of assets that should be developed to strategically contribute to the worth of an organization or individual who maintains it. These assets are seen as features that increase revenue and profit margin, persuading the customer to return. For that reason, not every brand will develop its assets in the same way.

Consider a coffee shop business that wants to develop a product that is easily recognized and different from the vast competition every coffee shop has, they could be interested in associating a particular coffee aroma with their product or brand, while delivering great customer service, outstanding quality, or a great experience, on the other hand, a plumber business makes the effort of doing their jobs swiftly and with the highest quality. The aforementioned traits are then transmitted through word-of-mouth. These examples of different business qualities are commonly communicated to create an archetype that exists in the mind and is not easy to copy, the archetype is composed of these qualities associated with other brand assets that contribute to the awareness of the product. Ask yourself what you feel when you think of a brand like Apple or Coca-Cola? that ideal is carefully crafted and its monetary value relies on its prevalence and the difficulty of reproducing that image in different products or services

Brand assets such as logo, colour palette, quality, product design, reliability, service, or nowadays social media followers represent a substantial part of the worth of the whole organization, therefore,  upon the acknowledgment of the different brand assets that compose the brand archetype, creating a strong association between them through advertising, word-of-mouth, and digital content, is important to increase the value of a brand. All aspects that can strengthen the perception, the performance, and the financial value should be developed and measured to determine their contribution to the business and growth.

Creating a data-driven brand strategy

To support brand-building efforts, an organization should use the wealth of data being created and transmitted every second. Employing that data for an effective brand strategy implies acknowledging which assets are being developed and recognizing every touch point that could serve as a way to measure performance.

There is a reason you might give a service provider a rating for their customer service after an interaction with them, or get asked in a survey how easy is to remember a product. All these questions give insight into the strength of the brand assets and contrasting these strengths with financial performance will give certainty to the brand strategy. It is coherent that a brand strategy needs to contribute to the overall organization achieving its market objectives and not be developed independently.

Simultaneously, listening and understanding consumer behaviour in the brand’s category put the organization ahead of any new trends. Developing new brand attributes with the use of descriptive techniques and AI will help to maintain a brand’s unique selling proposition afloat. All the data from social media and web content could be analysed descriptively through Data Mining to add new characteristics to the brand archetype. For example, innovation through diversity is a concept that has been helping organizations to grow and the customers recognize the efforts made by companies to be open to new ideas and resources. This is widely talked about on social media and companies have been catching the train by displaying changes in their logos during certain times. This approach to diversity will soon become part of their brand assets as they are more widely communicated.

Brand Metrics

Measuring and benchmarking brand assets will give a holistic view of the brand value. What metrics to measure largely depend on what assets are being developed, however, they can be included in two large groups: perception and performance metrics. In the perception metrics, understanding how much customers and potential customers are aware of a brand and how they feel about or perceive the brand are key components of this type of metrics. Questions such as how much a brand is recalled in certain situations or how high is a brand located at the top of mind will give clear insights. Furthermore, how a brand is perceived in terms of its promises in the market will also give insights into how good a brand is transmitting this information, or if they are accomplishing them.  In the performance metrics, how customers behave towards the brand is the main information to acquire at this level. It is important to know if a customer is willing to return for a new purchase or how easy it is to up-sell as clear examples of this type of metric.

Financial metrics are metrics that will make a brand understand how the organization’s investment in its development is returning a monetary value. Measuring brand ROI is a way to compare perception metrics and performance metrics as independent variables and financial metrics as dependent variables. Commonly, brand ROI belongs to marketing ROI, where the organization is contrasting overall marketing investment with growth. Instead, brand ROI will focus only on the development of brand assets and how they are impacting the organization’s financial performance.

Measuring brand assets

Due to the nature of a brand, where perception takes an important part of a brand’s value, behaviour towards the brand completes the picture, and biases are frequent, measuring brand assets takes a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Qualitative techniques are less structured methods that use smaller samples often at convenience, as a result, their insights won’t be statistically significant, but is a powerful way to identify connections and ideas towards the brand, while at the same time uncovering particular biases and predispositions that a customer or potential customer creates in their ideal of the brand. A technique such as observation in a situation where the product or service is used can give researchers insights into the marketing communication that is being transmitted to the customers. For example, a researcher can observe how a spirit drink is consumed in a setting. Whether it’s the preference of the customers or if it’s combined with something else. Other qualitative techniques such as focus groups and in-depth interviews can give insights into the perceived quality, relevance, and differentiation of the brand.

Quantitative techniques are structured methods that rely on statistical significance to give certainty to the questions researchers are asking. Surveys done on bigger samples built probabilistically can give a valid view over repeated purchases, satisfaction, acquisition, and leads. Brands often build panels to carry out a longitudinal study that will give insight into how are key metrics changing over time while in other cases cross-sectional studies will give a photograph of how is the brand standing at one point in time.