How Do You Measure Brand Performance? Five Key Steps

Brand performance reflects how well a brand is doing against its goals, both in the minds of its target audience and in the market. To measure it, you audit the brand, clarify its vision, set brand goals, choose the metrics that reflect those goals and then select a research method to track them over time. For most organisations, the most reliable method is brand tracking: a quantitative survey that measures the same metrics consistently, wave after wave, against competitors.

Why Measure Brand Performance?

First of all, why do you need to measure your brand performance? Surely, sales figures will tell you all you need to know. If your products and services are selling, then your brand is doing its job, right? Unfortunately, nowadays it is not quite as simple as all that. Your products could be selling despite your brand (in which case, just imagine how much better you could be doing). We’ve come a long way from the days when a brand was just an ownership mark stamped onto the side of a cow. Branding has developed in sophistication and nuance. Brands now do much more than just identify who owns a product (or living creature); a brand is a conversation between organisation and customer across every touchpoint including advertising, packaging, social media, employees, customer service and channel partners. And one mustn’t underestimate the importance of seemingly small elements such as colour in branding, brand logos or tone of voice: these all need to be consistent with your brand character and brand essence. Marketers create and manipulate brands to convey brand personality and brand purpose, and consumers project emotions and relationships onto brands. Good branding can produce brand growth and a bad rebrand can damage sales and market share. Measuring those shifts consistently, rather than inferring them from sales, is what a brand tracking programme is for.

Case Study: How a Change in Packaging Cost Tropicana $50 Million

This article in The Branding Journal shows how changing one small aspect of a brand (in this case, the packaging) can have a devastating effect.

This classic example of a branding failure comes from 2009, when Tropicana invested in new packaging and advertising. The main packaging change was from showing the outside of the orange to showing the inside: the juice. A small change for a brand in the international market, you might think, and for the better in that it shows the actual product. However, the impact was that within two months, the company had lost 20% of sales, with market share going to competitors. Because the packaging had a simpler design than the original one, consumers thought it was a low-range supermarket brand. The president of Tropicana North America said, “We underestimated the deep emotional bond [customers] had with the original packaging.” Overall, the ‘investment’ and the cost of fixing the problem added up to a cost of $50 million for the company.

Five Steps to Measuring Brand Performance

As the case study shows, it is important to listen to consumers and understand, in depth, what your brand means to them. Once you commit to measuring your brand performance, there are five steps to go through, as follows:

1. Conduct a brand audit

Before you get started, you need to put a stake in the ground and understand your original brand vision and how that translates to your current brand equity. A brand audit can be an informal process whereby you review your brand positioning strategy and explore your key brand touchpoints, both externally with customers and prospects and internally within your organisation. Alternatively, you can conduct a more formal audit which lists each of these touchpoints and evaluates how they are contributing to brand health. If you have multiple brands, your audit should also consider your brand architecture and how all of these brands work together.

2. Be clear about your brand vision

What is it that you want the brand to achieve? What is your brand purpose? The brand vision should align with the overall strategy of your organisation, but be at a higher level than strategy, and should be the guiding voice behind all decisions. Properly articulated, a brand vision can help to galvanise employees throughout the organisation, resonate with consumers and be instrumental in brand differentiation. As an example, Coca Cola’s vision statement is, “... to craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body & spirit. And done in ways that create a more sustainable business and better, shared future that makes a difference in people’s lives, communities and our planet.” Ikea’s is “To create a better everyday life for the many people.”

3. Set brand goals

Once you are clear about your brand vision and brand purpose, you can translate them into specific, strategic goals. What you measure subsequently needs to align with these goals. For example, if you have a relatively new and unknown brand, it is likely that your goal will be to drive brand awareness, whereas if you have a mature brand that is well known in your marketplace, you might need to update your brand personality to invigorate sales and build brand strength. Only once you are clear about what you want to achieve can you decide which brand metrics you need and how to define what brand health means to you.

4. Decide on your brand metrics

Once your goals are set, you can choose the metrics you need to track to evaluate whether you are meeting those goals. These will vary, but will typically include the following: brand awareness and salience measures, brand consideration and purchase intent measures, brand loyalty, brand positioning relative to competitors, brand sentiment and, potentially, brand advertising metrics. The decision about whether to measure brand advertising as part of your brand performance measurement as opposed to using a separate dedicated programme of research will depend primarily on the amount of advertising that you do. We’ve written a full guide to brand metrics in another article that you can use to help you decide what to measure.

5. Decide on your market research method

There are many ways you can approach measuring brand performance. You can gather brand metrics through various methods including social media listening, analysis of online reviews, qualitative interviews, focus groups, customer service feedback and website analytics. For example, social media listening will give you an unfiltered idea of the main ways your brand is discussed and the key topics you are associated with. Alternatively, if you are unsure about how your brand is positioned relative to competitors, you could conduct a qualitative brand mapping exercise. However, for the most effective and flexible way to measure brand performance, we recommend using a purpose-built, quantitative, longitudinal brand tracking survey, in other words, a brand tracker.

How to Build a Brand Equity Score

Brand equity is the added value a brand name brings to a product or service, reflected in how readily people choose it, recommend it and pay for it. We start by deconstructing what brand equity means to you. A brand equity score then rests on three decisions:

1. The brand metrics to include as the constituent elements that make up brand equity.

2. Any relative re-weighting that should be applied to each metric to equalise the scoring, for example to allow for differences in inherent brand stature.

3. The best way to aggregate the constituent scores into one overall equity score that is sensitive enough to pick up movements in the market.

Fixed or Flexible Measurement?

Brand performance can be measured with an off-the-shelf tool, which applies the same questionnaire and the same calculation to every brand, or with a programme designed around the brand being measured. A flexible approach such as that provided by Brandspeak has three advantages.

1. Tailored to your needs: we develop bespoke research and analysis that is responsive to and reflective of how the brand is activated, the context of the marketplace it’s competing in, and its stature in that marketplace.

2. Method agnostic: we can choose the most appropriate research methods and approaches for each brand. Occasionally, that means combining qualitative research to scope and explore your brand positioning with quantitative brand tracking.

3. Competitive advantage: a flexible approach gives you a measure designed for your brand alone. Bespoke research can provide a competitive advantage by delivering unique insights that are not available to competitors who may be using standardised tools.

Best Practice in Brand Performance Measurement

Whichever method you choose, a handful of principles separate brand performance tracking that informs decisions from measurement that simply produces numbers.

1. Set a baseline before you change anything. Take a reading before a rebrand, campaign or launch so that later movements can be attributed with confidence. As Tropicana discovered, finding out after the event is expensive.

2. Keep the measurement consistent. Use the same core questions, sample definition and fieldwork approach in every wave; otherwise, apparent changes in the brand may simply reflect changes in method.

3. Measure against competitors. A rise in awareness means little if a rival's awareness has risen faster, so benchmark your brand against the brands your customers actually consider.

4. Match the frequency to your market. Measure often enough to capture the effects of your marketing activity, but not so often that normal sampling variation is mistaken for real change.

5. Connect brand measures to commercial outcomes. Relate brand performance to sales, market share and pricing so that the board can see what brand investment returns. The reason is that short-term sales figures do not capture the full value of brand building: Binet and Field's analysis of advertising effectiveness found that the most effective balance of budget is, on average, around 60:40 between brand building and activation. Judging brand activity on short-term sales alone therefore understates its contribution.

For more on which measures to include, see our guide to brand tracking metrics, and for how those measures combine into a view of the brand's overall strength, our article on understanding brand health.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is brand performance?

Brand performance is how well a brand is doing against its goals, both in the minds of its target audience and in the market. It is usually measured through awareness, consideration, preference, loyalty and positioning against competitors, tracked consistently over time.

What is the difference between brand performance and brand health?

Brand health describes the strength of a brand at a given point, through measures such as awareness, perceptions and loyalty. Brand performance asks a broader question: whether those measures are moving in the direction your brand goals require, and whether that movement is feeding through to commercial results.

How often should you measure brand performance?

It depends on how quickly your market moves and how much marketing activity you run. Brands with frequent or heavy campaign activity usually need continuous or quarterly measurement, whereas brands in slower-moving categories may find six-monthly or annual waves are enough. What matters most is measuring at consistent intervals, so that changes can be read as genuine movements.

What sample size do you need to measure brand performance?

As a rule of thumb, you need a minimum of around 100 respondents per market or audience group for the results to be readable. Larger samples are needed if you want to detect small changes between waves or to analyse sub-groups within an audience.

Can you measure brand performance without a survey?

Partly. Social media listening, online reviews, branded search volumes, website analytics and sales data all give useful signals. However, they describe what people do or say in public rather than what the wider market thinks, so most organisations combine them with survey-based tracking of awareness, consideration and perceptions.

How long does it take to set up brand performance measurement?

At Brandspeak, setting up a brand tracker typically takes four to six weeks, with the first results around eight weeks from commission.

Conclusion

The chances are that your brand performance measurement challenge falls somewhere on the spectrum between needing to identify your cattle and having to mop up a $50 million packaging error. Whatever the size or shape of your brand measurement requirement, we can help. For more information on how to measure your own brand’s performance, talk to one of Brandspeak’s brand research experts. Talk to a Brand Research Expert