A good performance demands good applause, but how are you going to applaud for something you haven’t even measured?
When you work relentlessly for countless days and nights to make things work, use credible resources, and invest time and money in all your efforts, and one day it eventually blooms, how are you going to gauge it? Actually, forget that. How are you ever going to measure a good brand strategy so that you can point out the key areas that are working and, of course, the aspects that are not working?
Every sport, every market, and every business has some key metrics that they show to help the public understand the performance in a better way. These key metrics are indicators showcasing the potential and failure with quantifiable figures.
Yes, that’s the number one job these key metrics have: to make things quantifiable. It assesses markets and strategies to turn qualitative data into quantitative insights. With the help of these metrics, brand strategy experts, consultants, and managers tend to understand aspects such as consumer behavior, brand reputation, buying patterns, needs, and customer satisfaction.
Today we are going to discuss and decode six key metrics that will help you measure your brand strategy.
Brand Recall
Tell me. In the last one year, which is that one brand that you could easily recall at all times?
Go on, give it a thought.
Okay, let me tell you mine. For me it’s Fevicol, Fogg, and of course Maggi.
Yes, you may say that these are big brands and have penetrated the market on a very deep level, but there is more to that. These brands have one thing in common, and that is consistent content across all platforms, viral ads, and great brand positioning.
It’s not a Maggi; it’s noodles, but you say you want Maggi.
It’s not Fevicol; it’s an adhesive, but you only ask for Fevicol.
So you see, that brand recall value is so strong that it has replaced the product by its name.
How do you measure brand recall?
Now, it can be done through multiple methods such as focus groups, tracking studies, and surveys. Take surveys, for example. Respondents are asked to mention brands they have seen recently or ads or taglines that they remember. It's a common method.
As per Geckoboard, the brand recall formula = Number of respondents recalling a brand / Total number of respondents x 100.
This will give us a percentage of a certain brand’s recall in public.
For brand strategy companies, tracking brand recall over time is an essential part of gauging emotional resonance and top-of-mind awareness.
Customer Clarity
Is it okay for a clothing brand to be confused with a food brand?
Will it be fine if tomorrow your furniture company is seen as a software firm?
No, right?
Well, that is what the customer clarity metric is all about. It simply means how well your target audience perceives your brand message across platforms and different communication channels. It resembles whether your business communicates with its customers in sync or not. For effective branding success, it is a key metric to be analyzed and worked upon.
Now, there is no direct formula to assess it; it can be tracked by deriving a series of scores such as customer satisfaction score, customer effort score, first contact resolution, customer lifetime value, user intent metrics, and net promoter score.
All these are prominent metrics that help you define your customer clarity.
Most brand strategy specialists use a mix of these data points to ensure the message your audience receives is the one you actually intended to send.
Lead Quality
This is where things get real. It’s good if a customer can recall a brand, and it's good if there is high customer clarity, but you know what’s great?
Converting potential customers into paying customers—in short, sales.
Sales is the backbone for major business success. In today’s market, there is cutthroat competition to acquire business and get your customers to pay, but if you can do that, that’s pure business success right there.
The lead quality metric describes how likely a potential customer is to become a paying customer. Again, it can be tracked through multiple metrics like conversion rate, lead response time, and sales acceptance rate. All these metrics are majorly expressed in percentage to showcase how likely it is for you to acquire a customer and close deals.
Top brand strategy professionals pay close attention to lead quality as it directly ties brand perception to revenue-generating behavior.
Pricing Power
This metric also showcases how good your brand loyalty is; the metric simply shows how well a company can raise its product prices without losing its customers to its competitors.
We can once again look at the brand strategy of Maggi. Maggi is owned by Nestle, and it is not selling you noodles; it is selling you an emotion, the number one thing you think about eating whenever you are hungry.
Whether it's 2 AM in a hostel or a breezy morning in the mountains, people just want to have Maggi, and it evokes an emotion, an emotion of connecting with their childhood, a memory of their mom preparing it at home, or opening it in school during lunch break.
But if I ask you what the price of Maggi is, you know it has been hiked by the company multiple times, but did it lose its customers? No, in fact it has grown a fandom of its own. No matter how many brands come and go, it’s just there enjoying its monopoly.
So in simple words, if your customers are choosing you over your competitors in spite of you increasing the price, that’s pure brand strategy success right there.
Brand strategy agencies often use pricing power as a barometer of both brand equity and competitive differentiation.
Employee Advocacy
Is your team using the product they promote?
Are they satisfied with the product they manufacture?
If they are not, how are you planning to target the other customers?
Remember, your employees are your first customers. If the team who is working day and night to make something does not believe in it, does not endorse it, and does not offer word-of-mouth publicity to it, you are certainly not amplifying the strategy in the right direction.
If your own team struggles to believe the brand story, customers will smell it.
Sometimes, it's not just about using it but the joy of representing something, feeling proud to be associated with something.
For instance, suppose there is a viral ad for a clothing brand, and everyone at parties, meetings, and social gatherings is talking about it, and suddenly you appear and tell them that you work for the brand. This is a positive reinforcement that will attract more positive traction to the brand.
They will ask you about the brand.
They would like you to be their point of contact with the brand.
And of course, you can promote the brand to an already interested audience.
To track employee advocacy, brands can run internal branding campaigns, monitor employee retention, and make the products more accessible to their employees.
Some of the top brand strategy firms monitor this metric closely to align internal culture with external brand promise.
Competitive Positioning
A competitive positioning metric depends on different elements such as market share, pricing, brand awareness, acquisition rate, and so on. In a nutshell, it simply means how well your brand is positioned in the market compared to your competitors.
Are your customers choosing you or comparing you with your competitors?
Your ambition and target should remain the same, and that is to be chosen against all market competitors and alternatives. Not just that, to become the real choice of your target audience.
We often stress the fact that when there is a customer, there will be a competition.
Always operate keeping this in mind. A competitive positioning can help you understand your position in the market, and what can you do to uplift it?
Brand strategy consulting allows you to identify gaps in your current positioning and sharpen your brand’s competitive edge.
Final Thoughts
Brand strategies take time to work. It needs proper implementation and timely execution. The results are not something that you can observe overnight. But these six key metrics can tell you a lot about your brand strategy performance and allow you to update, adapt, and shift your agendas and targets from time to time based on the metric figures. It is always better to monitor them and use them collectively to arrive at a well-versed outcome.
Make note of all these metrics and learn to use them strategically to revive your brand strategy. Whether you're working with a brand strategy consultant, a brand strategy company, or exploring brand strategy solutions internally—tracking these metrics will give you the clarity to course correct and grow.
