If you are responsible for managing your brand, you will know that it’s no easy task. It’s your job not only to plan the strategy, but also to organise the brand-building activities, managing agencies while also overseeing internal communications. After all this, it’s hardly surprising that many brand managers are guilty of overlooking the importance of monitoring brand progress. It’s one thing working out where your brand should be going, but how do you know if you have got there?
Sales figures or other general business metrics are not enough. And if you are unlucky enough to have brand-sceptical senior management breathing down your neck and questioning every investment you make, you need a way to prove the value that you are bringing to the business. Monitoring is an essential part of branding because it will help you to ensure branding is funded as it should be and it will, of course, increase the effectiveness of what you are doing by proving that your work is having the desired effect.
How does your brand measure up?
The most powerful measurement is a quantitative one: it’s difficult to argue with the figures. But you should focus on producing statistics and measurements that are relevant to your situation:
1. Strategic brand success. This should be measured against what you set out to achieve, and no sensible brand strategy sets out to achieve everything. Strategic aims may have included awareness amongst a specific target audience. You may have been focusing on customer satisfaction issues. Equally your aim may have been to increase margins by growing the premium that customers are prepared to pay for the product. The point is not to lose your focus: there may be other positive side effects to your activities that you will want people to know about, but you should always be measured against what you were trying to do in the first place.
2. Your competition. Even if you have achieved your objectives, you need to know how this compares to your competition. You may have increased your margins, but what if some of your competitors have increased them even more? This could prove that you have chosen the right strategy; it might indicate that the market is generally favourable and you would have been successful anyway because everyone is doing well; it could show that there is a better way to do what you’re doing.
How you collect the information – whether by polling customers yourself or working with a research agency – is largely dependent on the time and budget you have available, which is why it is always a good idea to earmark some budget for it at the outset.
What are people saying about you?
Although more difficult to measure, and more open to interpretation, qualitative monitoring can often be the most revealing. It will reveal many things that cannot be reduced to statistics, e.g:
Brand experience: How do customers describe their experience of dealing with you? Invite them to use their own words.
Brand associations: What do customers associate with your brand? Efficiency? Reliability? Innovation? Or slow service, low quality and poor availability?
Brand preferences: If not you, then who? And why?
Conventionally, this kind of information is gained from focus groups, but as usage of online forums and information exchanges has exploded amongst B2B buyers in the last few years, so it has become the best way to get an idea of how your brand is doing. At the same time, it has become an extremely important way of improving brand perception. On-line reputation management works both ways.
While it is very much a hot topic at the moment, online reputation management is really all about good old-fashioned word of mouth. But the fact that this now happens online brings us some crucial differences:
1. A negative (or positive) comment about your brand can be seen by millions of potential customers
2. A negative (or positive) comment about your brand will remain “in print” (and searchable by Google) for years.
3. You can always find out what people are saying. On the web, nothing is hidden.
There are many convenient ways to find out what people are saying, Google Alerts being perhaps the best-known example. Simply choose a few keywords and it will tell you whenever anything new appears on the web that fits those criteria; you will soon have alert emails sent to you whenever anyone talks about your brand. Of course, this needs some filtering, so a little trial and error might be needed when choosing your keywords. “Brand X sucks” might be an interesting starting point…
Managing your reputation online
Of course, the web not only allows you to see what people are saying; it also gives you a chance to deal with any negative perceptions. But what can you do to correct any negative perceptions of your brand? Broadly, you have two options:
1. Try to control it
There are techniques you can use to impose yourself on the web. To suppress the bad stuff. But we wouldn’t recommend them – or certainly not in isolation. Trouble is, individual users, when they have something interesting or controversial to say, have a habit of being heard.
One technique is to dominate Google. Your SEO expert will offer enormous technical detail about how this can be achieved, by cleverly using sub-domains and references to other controllable’ web resources to occupy the top results in Google. Since 90 per cent of all click-throughs from Google happen from the results above the fold, you can push the bad news down to a ranking where it will be far less visible. (Interestingly, however, the desirability of Google ranking results is not uniform. Seventh place, which is just above the fold, attracts just 0.1 per cent of click-throughs, whereas 8th place gets almost 3 per cent, since it is in the dominant position on the second page.)
But, although search engines are the starting point for the vast majority of web journeys, the bad news will always find a way through. The best option is to face up to it…
2. Be honest, and correct it
That’s right. Simply do something about it. When someone posts a blog complaining about lack of service, get in touch with them and deal with their problem. That’s pretty good service, I’d have thought. True, it doesn’t actually correct the wider problem – but then there wasn’t necessarily a wider problem in the first place! Only one person blogged about it, so there was only (possibly) a localised problem, although it made it look like a much bigger problem. Also, crucially, you are leveraging the power of the web. The web is a megaphone that helped one person make waves with a single bad experience. Correct that individual’s perception of you by doing something for them, and you have every chance of turning them into a convert. They will at least record the fact that you did something about the problem – and when they do so, they will use the very same megaphone they used to complain in the first place.
So when we say “be honest and correct it”, we really mean “be clever and correct it”. Call it what you like, but this is really more about shrewd reputation management than honesty
Keep your brand on track
In summary, every brand manager should do everything he or she can to keep their finger on the pulse – and it is often easier than it seems. The key is to ensure that the task of brand monitoring is not overlooked, and that some budget is set aside for this purpose from the start. This will allow you to keep your brand going in the direction, whilst also providing you with the ammunition to fight your corner when required to justify the budget next year. And of course, make web reputation management a part of your daily routine.
By Richard Bush, MD, Base One
