How Healthy is Your Brand? 10 Questions to Find an Answer
Measuring the effectiveness and impact of your brand is an ongoing challenge. Most non-creatives (and even some creatives) struggle to quantify the effectiveness of color, type and logos in a comprehensible rubric. We know what we feel, just not how to (measure) that.
A large part of DBC's approach to brand development is quantitative. To put this into practice, we expanded on a methodology developed by Fombrun and Van Riel in 2004 and turned it into a scorecard to help our clients measure and track the health of their brands.
Our assessment measures a brand across five vectors:
Visibility
Distinctiveness
Transparency
Authenticity
Consistency
In short:
Visibility is how prominent a brand is within its industry. We measure how much market share and awareness it has. For smaller organizations, a simpler approach can be a search engine ranking or checking the size of its social media audience.
Distinctiveness measures how different a brand is from its competitors. We answer the question of whether your customers understand your unique selling proposition. Harvard Professor Michael Porter, Ph.D., argues that you should brand to be the most unique, not the “best”.
Transparency is the view from the outside. Can a brand's audience identify its purpose and values from its outward-facing collateral? This includes its website, identity and marketing materials.
Authenticity is the inside-out perspective. What does the organization do when nobody's watching? We look to see if the values we discovered above are followed throughout the organization. A great way to find this is to look at the organization’s ratings on Glassdoor.com.
Consistency is arguably the most important measurement. A transparent and highly visible brand on the web means nothing if it's not authentic to the experience customers have when interacting with the sales team. Inconsistent brands create a letdown for customers at one level and you risk losing their engagement.
Now let's put this knowledge to work. We've developed a self assessment for your brand. It will help you stay out of the danger zone, where your brand fails to connect with its audience.
Take the assessment below and let us know your results in the comments or via email.