When you’re running a business, it’s important for you to track your performance. If you don’t know how your decisions impact your business, you don’t know if those decisions are good or bad! Most reporting of business performance focuses on the financial side of things: revenue and profit; leads generated and deals closed. There’s another key aspect of your business you need to be aware of: your brand. Each decision you take can affect your brand, and that can have dramatic and long lasting effects on what sort of and how many customers you attract to your business.
This kind of tracking is important: the DoorDash growth strategy is a success story only because they had access to the data that showed them how they were performing and what their capacity was for more rapid growth, to take just one example.
What is a Brand?
If you’re going to track how your brand is performing, you need to know what a brand is. It’s not simply branding a logo on your products and advertising. A brand is the personality your customers assign to your business that allows them to relate to it on a personal level, to feel pleasure and most importantly loyalty. It’s made up of much more than your advertising: customers build their perception of your brand from every interaction they have with your company. Not just the adverts they see, but how and when they see them; making a purchase; browsing your website; even hearing about your business from a friend.
Measuring Brand Strength
It might sound like brand perception is too individual to measure, but with expert assistance, your brand health can be surveyed and quantified, allowing you to make better decisions over time.
Market research companies can perform ‘brand tracker’ surveys – asking customers to rate your brand for the key qualities that deliver success in your industry against your key competitors, so you can see how you’re performing versus the people you need to outcompete!
You can also use a specialised kind of A/B testing to measure a variable called Brand Uplift. If you launch one of your digital ads in two different versions (one lacking your branding) to selected audiences, you can track the response: the clicks, the conversions, the sales that tell you the advert was effective. The difference between the responses to the two adverts is a measure of Brand Uplift: the value your brand adds to your product!
