A brand that is measured gets managed, and monitoring the health of a brand would only put the brand in a higher position in the market. How do businesses measure the performance of their brands, and what are the successful strategies?

Brand is the most valuable asset of any business. A business, after getting established would like to measure the performance of its brand. Evaluating the performance of a brand makes the branding process powerful, and more controllable. It helps in enhancing brand effectiveness, thereby contributing to the customer base expansion.

In the consumer-oriented market, creative marketing integrators play a crucial role in making the product successful. Starting from the inception of a product, till consumer interaction, advertising, and planning, brand managers ensure all parts fall in place, and the products make their way in an appropriate manner into the market.

Currently, with the advent of globalization, and increasing expectations of the customers competition has become intense. Consumers are well aware of the product pricing, and quality expectations. They get product information through multiple channels such as digital and social media which cannot be influenced by companies directly. These factors make the market more complicated, and this complex nature of the market endanger brand existence. Many a times companies fail to monitor market changes and thereby do not realize that their new product is not creating value any longer. A proper measurement about the performance of a brand is required so as to leverage the brand value in terms of buying and selling.

Conventional tools do not help:

Conventional methods of measuring brand performance include financial methods such as earning-based approach, price-earning multiple methods, and historical cost methods. Despite they provide the required results, these processes require a lot of data manipulation, and other factors to be considered. A successful brand evaluation should be market-oriented. This method considers various brand profit factors from the consumer's point of view. It would aid the business to nourish its brand based on the customer feedback, and henceforth prove successful.

Market recognition and healthy profits are the general yardsticks for measuring brand performance. Apart from this many other factors are to be considered while measuring brand performance:


  • The position of the brand in the customers mind.
  • Access the level of public awareness for the brand.
  • Customer's loyalty towards the brand.
  • What, according to the customer's opinion makes the brand, a unique product.
  • Price sensitivity of the brand.
  • Brand value and accessibility perceptions.
  • Emotional relation of the customer with the brand.
  • Brand distribution, market share, sales and profitability.


A strong brand identity also helps in enhancing brand recognition and performance. Brand identity includes companys culture, investment values, business strategies, and financial performance.


Challenges:


One complication with brands is that, sometimes customers pay a premium price not because of the brand's functionality, but because it represents a lifestyle. When evaluating these kinds of brands, care has to be taken to understand the emotional needs of customers. Apart from this, cost cutting, and standardization strategies of businesses strip off the monitoring process. All these create significant bottlenecks in analyzing and evaluating the performance of brands.


Appropriate brand evaluation methods not only helps in getting historical, cost based measure, but also helps in identifying future results. It enables the business to recognize the magnitude of the brand in relation to the entire organization.


References:


1)     Brandingstrategyinsider.com

2)     Intangiblebusiness.com

3)     Career-intelligence.com