If you are responsible for managing your brand, you will know that it’s no easy task. It’s your job to not only plan the strategy, but also to organise the brand-building activities and manage agencies, while also overseeing internal communications. It’s one thing working out where your brand should be going, but how do you know if you have got there?
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.
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. 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 by trying to achieve everything at once.
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 your competitors have increased them even more? 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 your time and budget, which is why it is always a good idea to earmark some budget for it at the outset.
Although more difficult to measure and more open to interpretation, qualitative monitoring on the following issues can often be the most revealing.
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 and reliability? Or poor service and 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, 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. Online reputation management works both ways.
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.
A negative (or positive) comment about your brand can be seen by millions of potential customers. A negative (or positive) comment about your brand will also remain ‘in print’ (and searchable by Google) for years. In addition, 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. Choose a few keywords and it will tell you whenever anything new appears on the web that fits those criteria; you will then know whenever anyone talks about your brand.
Of course, the web also allows you to deal with any negative perceptions about your brand. Broadly, you have two options:
1. Try to control it: 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.
2. Be honest and correct it: When someone posts a blog complaining about lack of service or a poor product, 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 issue but then there wasn’t necessarily a wider issue in the first place. If only one person blogged about it, it might only have been a localised problem. So when we say ‘be honest and correct it’, we really mean ‘be clever and correct it’. This is really more about shrewd reputation management than honesty.
In summary, every brand manager should do everything they 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.
