All you need to know about brand performance
Brand performance is a major topic in the world of marketing. It shouldn’t just be left down to the occasional indicator measurements, and should instead be part of a more comprehensive approach. The challenges faced by your brand are specific to it and its market. That’s why its performance analysis should also be specifically tailored to it. That’s why we’ve come to the rescue with this guide that should clear things up!
OVERVIEW
What is brand performance?
If you just look it up online, you’ll find countless different definitions of brand performance.
Not super helpful when you’re trying to figure things out.
Yet, there’s a pretty simple reason why there are so many. For some, performance is not necessarily measured in the same way as others.
So, it makes sense, if you think about it! Each brand faces its own, unique challenges!
We’ve all got specific sales or marketing goals that are tailored to our own context, business sector, constraints and opportunities…
Developing and maintaining a powerful brand therefore obviously involves achieving these goals.
So, to measure this performance, you’re going to need to prioritize and analyze various indicators in line with the challenges you’re taking on.
Why is it important to measure your brand performance?
Your brand is a crucial element of your business development. When it’s strong, it often gives you a decisive advantage over your competitors on the market.
We all know the story of Apple, which has dominated the smartphone market for a long time now, despite its products being much more expensive that those of its competitors. The American company’s brand image and its perception by consumers have hugely contributed to this success.
That said, you should always keep in mind that a positive position on a market or in consumers’ minds is never guaranteed to be permanent.
There are several events that may influence your brand’s performances – for better or for worse. It may be marketing actions you or your competitors have launched, a bad buzz or even an economic, social or environmental context you have absolutely no control over.
Regardless of popularity, the perception or even the history of your brand, measuring its performance remains essential.
As a business with roots firmly established in your market, you’ll be looking to keep hold of your positive perception by consumers. Monitoring your performances will help you to anticipate and identify risks which may impact your brand.
If you’re more of a challenger on a highly competitive market, some indicators will be of more use to you, allowing you to detect future development opportunities.
Regardless of your business’ profile, remember that measuring your brand performance will help you to make the right decisions at the right time, optimizing your marketing investments.
What are the 4 pillars of the brand funnel?
In order to be able to measure your brand performance, you’ll first need to identify the challenges you’re faced with.
Are you looking to develop your popularity? Or are you more into insights that can show you how you could work on brand preference? Maybe you even want to understand what’s driving your consumers to buy your products instead of your competitors’ products.
Once you’ve identified the challenges ahead, you’ll need to translate them into concrete performance indicators.
There’s a huge spectrum of metrics that will cover the entire brand funnel.
The brand funnel represents the global vision of your brand, built around 4 principal pillars:
👉 Popularity
👉 Preference
👉 Intent
👉 Loyalty
Depending on your challenges, you can delve deeper into the details of one or more of these issues.
Each pillar brings together a certain number of specific brand performance indicators, which help you to prioritize the ones that you want to monitor and analyze.
Putting together your own selection of KPIs, covering the various steps of the funnel, means that you can create an extremely concrete and operational dashboard that allows you to quickly identify the fields where you brand is performing at its best, and those which require a little more TLC and work.
Of course, you can combine several brand challenges by using various indicators that cover the various steps of the brand funnel.
Thanks to these insights, you’ll then be able to conduct more detailed analysis, so that you can identify the exact reasons behind any variations in the results for each of your KPIs.
Now, let’s take a look at these 4 pillars of the brand funnel in more detail:
Pillar #1 - Popularity
This first pillars helps you identify and understand the overall popularity of your brand with the consumers on your market.
The main popularity KPIs measured are:
Top-of-mind awareness:
Is your brand the first one that comes to mind for the individuals surveyed?
Aided awareness:
Can your brand be picked out from among competitors?
Contact memorization:
Do consumers remember having come into contact with your brand recently?
Consideration:
Do consumers see your brand as a potential response to their needs?
Purchase intent:
How likely is your brand to be chosen by consumers in the purchase phase?
Pillar #2 - Preference
This second pillar will enable you to confirm whether the perception of your brand by consumers aligns with your brand image goals.
This way, you’re holding all the cards and able to make the best decisions possible to optimize your actions.
The main preference KPIs measured are:
Brand preference: To what degree to consumers like your brand in relation to competitors?
Brand perception: How is your brand perceived by the consumers on your market?
Image items:
Which items are most frequently associated with your brand by consumers?
Sentiment items: What sentiments and emotions are most commonly associated with your brand by consumers?
Consideration: Do consumers see your brand as a potential response to their needs?
Pillar #3 - Intent
This pillar helps you to identify and understand the reasons which are motivating or stopping your consumers when they’re in a purchasing context.
The main intent KPIs measured are:
Brand preference:
👉 To what degree to consumers like your brand in relation to competitors?
Value for money: How do consumers see the balance between the perceived quality of your brand or products and your pricing?
Understanding: Do consumers understand your offering and how it can be of interest to them?
Response to needs: To what degree to consumers see your brand or product as a response to their needs?
Purchasing capacity: Are the applied prices and availability of points of sale aligning with your consumers’ purchasing capacity?
Recruitment opportunity: Is your brand optimally attractive to potential applicants?
Pillar #4 - Loyalty
This last (but not least) pillar enables you to compare consumer opinions following purchases and the consumption of products or services.
This way, you can evaluate your strengths and the challenges that you’re going to need a little more oomph to overcome in relation to consumers’ experience with your brand.
The main loyalty KPIs measured are:
Brand satisfaction:
👉 To what degree are your consumers satisfied with your brand, products and/or services?
Brand experience:
👉 Which items are positively or negatively influencing consumer relations with your brand?
Repeat purchase intent:
👉 Are your consumers prepared to re-purchase your products or even upgrade a range?
How to make the most of your data?
As you’ve probably gathered by now, there are several indicators for measuring your brand performance throughout the brand funnel.
To lead an effective strategy, we recommend following these 3 good practices:
#1 - Identify the right indicators
Each of the 4 pillars of the brand funnel includes multiple performance indicators.
Of course, you can’t measure and/or analyze all of them. That would take a super long time and it probably wouldn’t be all that useful.
That’s why your first move should be to select the key indicators that you want to measure,
Some are more important than others when it comes to adapting to your context and your goals. So, these are the ones you’ll focus on.
Depending on the specific challenges you’re tackling, this choice will enable you to cover either the whole brand funnel or just part of it.
Make sure that the KPIs selected are concrete and operational. Generating metrics that are of no use to you doesn’t make sense, and all you’ll achieve is time-wasting when it comes to analyzing them.
#2 - Continuously monitor your performances
Have you already tried out an awareness barometer for your brand? You the report you get annually (or quarterly, at beast) weeks after your initial request and that ate up a huge chunk of your marketing budget?
Yes, that one. The one that, when you finally get your hands on it, you can’t generally do much with… Why is that? Well, the data is often outdated, and largely unusable as it only reflects the situation at the time when the testing was carried out.
You wouldn’t risk basing your entire digital strategy on data recorded by your website 6 months ago. So, why do the same when it comes to developing your brand?
That’s why it’s absolutely essential for you to measure your brand performance in real time. These figures need be just as quick and simple to obtain as those for your web traffic, social media engagement and even your sales cycle.
You can then implement effective actions based on fresh information, which brings us to our next point…
#3 - Make the right decisions at the right time
You’re now able to monitor your brand performance data continuously. Congratulations – but the work isn’t quite done yet.
The interest in measuring your key indicators doesn’t lie in getting flashy graphics that just look good when you present them in meetings. What you really want is to achieve your marketing goals.
Analyzing your metrics on a daily basis gives you a huge advantage. The advantage of making strategic decisions quickly and pertinently, based on the opportunities or risks mapped out in the data.
Monitoring this data also enables you to validate the impact of your actions in real time. In the same sense, you’ll have better visibility over the effects on your brand created by your competitors’ initiatives.
If you’re using a large variety or volume of your KPIs, it’ll be easier to launch additional measurements, so that you can delve further into the details to identify causes.
It’s also worth noting that the selection of your performance indicators is never set in stone. Your brand evolves, as do its friction points, so naturally the challenges you face do, too.
To align with your progression across the various steps of the funnel, you can then (or in parallel) work on other aspects, so you can become the top-performing brand on your market.
The aim of this article was to give you a heads up regarding the necessity of measuring your brand performance, and to help get your head around its various components. With this overall vision of your brand funnel in real time, you have the keys to achieving your marketing goals quicker and with a lot less stress.
Want to discover the best solution to measure your brand performance? Discover Happydemics!
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