When it comes to activating a brand, ongoing analysis and metrics evaluation is just as important as the upfront strategic foundation work. Brand health is the practice of taking a continuous pulse of your brand’s performance across a holistic set of metrics--a practice we’ve seen many CMOs beginning to embrace.

1. By Marianne Moore, Partner, Strategic Services, Stein + Partners Brand Activation
Unlocking Business Value Through Brand Health
When it comes to activating a brand, ongoing analysis and metrics evaluation is just as important as the
upfront strategic foundation work. Brand health is the practice of taking a continuous pulse of your brand’s
performance across a holistic set of metrics--a practice we’ve seen many CMOs beginning to embrace.
In fact, much has been written lately about brand health and its direct correlation with business
performance and, ultimately, company valuation. An article on brand health that caught our attention was
"Measuring Brand Health to Improve Top Line Growth," from MIT Sloan Management Review. In it, the
authors posit that too often companies are just fixated on tracking awareness--but focusing on awareness
alone ends up limiting their ability to activate their brands and truly optimize business performance.
Much like the authors of that Sloan article, we believe brand health has to be considered across a robust
metrics framework. We think of that
framework in a 360-degree view, as
shown in this illustration:
What this means for today’s CMO is
that you can’t optimize your brand
performance by just looking at
awareness or image perceptions; you
need to consider performance based
on the interaction of a number of
variables. Specifically, you have to
consider:
Measuring awareness on
both an unaided and aided
basis and compared to core
competitors--on an ongoing
basis.
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2. Brand perceptions in at least two dimensions:
o Reputation: Are there any perceptions that are limiting commitment to the brand or
negative associations that are repelling customers?
o Distinctiveness: In what ways does the target audience perceive the brand as apart from
competitors?
Social sentiment: In today’s social ecosystem, it's important to monitor blogs, microblogs, social
networks, forums, video and photowebs, product reviews, and other social media to listen in on
what these various communities are saying about the brand.
Customer satisfaction: Customers are no longer passive participants in brands. As such, earning
and maintaining/growing loyalty is of paramount importance.
o We typically measure customer satisfaction via the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
methodology. NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s
customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By
tracking and measuring these groups, brands can get a simple, clear measure of their
performance through customers’ eyes.
Business performance: In this regard, we look at sales, market share, and other relevant business-
performance KPIs.
The kind of holistic end-to-end measurement outlined in this framework is the only real pathway to fast
growth and large company valuations.
For example, strong brand awareness and positive image associations may drive initial acquisition, but if
your customers are not satisfied because of some experience, service, or pricing barrier, they won’t come
back. That yields a business model with constant churn--which drives excessive investment in acquisition.
Conversely, strong customer satisfaction without awareness makes for a small niche business, limiting
growth, and valuation.
And importantly, in today’s customer-driven marketing era you can have solid brand awareness, good
brand perceptions, and even solid customer satisfaction, but if the blogs start negative conversations,
significant brand damage can be done overnight.
The bottom line: Brand health is essential to brand activation and business-performance optimization.
Without this holistic view and a vigilant watch on all of the brand health metrics, your ability to succeed
and activate business value will be limited.
Read more: http://www.cmo.com/branding/unlocking-business-value-through-brand-
health#ixzz27VgzLRwF
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