In this blog we will run through what Brand Equity is, why it’s important to you and your brand and why you should be working to increase your company’s brand equity. Let’s take a look at the complete guide to enhancing your brand’s equity and market position:
1. Understanding
Brand equity is the worth of a company’s brand in and of itself, or the social value of a well known brand name. Your brand equity is affected by your marketing efforts to build your brand name, image/identity, awareness, association, recognition and customers perception of your brand. This will usually take a series of comprehensive brand, customer and brand experience surveys.
a. Why is brand equity important
Your brand equity helps to build customer loyalty, it helps to build your perceived brand value, helps to build your competitive advantage, and these attributes lead to increased sales, revenue and profit.
2. Measuring Your Brand’s Equity
There are several ways you can go about measuring brand equity. This is typically composed of measuring and tracking different components of your brand, here are some of the ways you can determine your equity:
a. Measure your brand awareness and recognition
To start you will go through targeted customer survey’s, measuring your website traffic and social media mentions, sediment, etc..
b. Track customer loyalty and satisfaction
You will want to track your customer retention rate, your NPS or Net promoter score and customer satisfaction surveys and repeat purchase rate. The understanding and tracking of these items will significantly help you to determine your brand equity.
c. Tracking the perception of your quality
We like to do a competitive comparison between you and your competitors. What are the differences separating you from your competitors, and what makes you stand out from the crowd and be better than those competitors. Also, we’ll need to measure the perception of your quality and how that stacks up as well in the marketplace.
d. Understanding your financial metrics
Another aspect of measuring your brand equity is the measure of your company and brand’s financial metrics. You would measure your sales/revenue, profit, market share, stock price and how far your brand has helped you grow and expand. You will want to develop the financial value of your brand that feeds into your companies value.
e. Auditing your brand association and image
A fun aspect of looking at your brand equity is to review your brand’s association and its brand image. I love looking at a brand’s elements, from the messaging and positioning, logo/brand design, brand accents, elements and then packing it all together into a whole brand.
f. Brand equity examples
You read in different business publications how brands like Target, where you’ve seen the bright red bullseye of their logo, and seen their commercials and we hear about the value of their brand equity and value are a great example of a strong brand.
3. Building Strong Brand Awareness
One of the key factors of building your brand equity is to build your brand awareness. You can and should build up your brand awareness through an omni-channel approach, usually composed of paid advertising through traditional and online channels as well as organic mediums like content campaigns, SEO and social media. All of these efforts can consist of a coordinated on brand, on message campaign that builds your presence in the marketplace as well as your brand awareness.
4. Strengthening Brand Associations
A thing we also like to do is strengthen our brand associations, or as we say build up your strategic brand partners and advocates. Do things like developing your co-op campaigns with other string brands where you can help one another out, reach a new sphere of influence or new channels. These types of efforts can also help you in leveraging brand equity each of the partners has and allows you both to grow and prosper.
5. Boosting Perceived Quality and Value
Another way to boost your brand equity is to boost your perceived brand quality and value.
a. A great example of this utilizing testimonials and case studies that have customers speaking on your behalf about your brand’s quality and value and the great experience they had in working with you. This is one of the key components of brand equity and enhances your market position.
6. Fostering Brand Loyalty
The best and most direct way to foster and improve your brand loyalty is to deliver great brand experiences with your customers. I know this sounds overly simple but it is so true.
a. Your best lead source are referrals from your customer base, i.e. these brand advocates, thus why it’s so important to keep them happy, check in with or engage with them on a regular basis, making sure your customers are raving brand fanatics, this is the easiest way to to building brand loyalty and increasing your brand awareness and equity.
b. Another key component is understanding Brand equity theory. In short, your brand’s value is built upon positive perceptions from your customers, and those perceptions, associations and loyalty that consumers hold about your brand impacts your ability to charge premium prices that help you gain market share.
7. Enhancing Market Position
Brands that evaluate their brand and positioning on a regular basis are more likely to keep themselves separated from the competition and stay a step ahead in a competitive market place. Enhancing your market position is critical to enhancing not only your market position, but also increasing your brand equity.
a. If you need help evaluating your brand or market position, you may want to consider getting help from a brand consulting agency and their branding company services include doing a market and brand position analysis, it could be very beneficial.
8. Leveraging Brand Equity for Business Growth
Having a strong brand equity means that you can leverage that to turbo charge your business growth. Below is a great example of how your brand equity helps to drive your business growth.
a. Enhancing brand equity in marketing
Your brand equity significantly helps you in your marketing gain more recognition in social media, that brand equity significantly helps in your keyword and key phase searches online and in search engines. These increased awareness turns into more website traffic and increased sales and revenue.
9. Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Enhancing Brand Equity
Let’s take a look at a few common brand equity pitfalls:
- Bad quality – Nothing drives people away more than bad quality of your product or service.
- Negative PR – Bad news typically turns into poor sales.
- Poor customer brand experiences – negative customer experiences are very hard to overcome.
- Bland and boring brand image – Bland and boring brands are a great way to repel prospects vs attracting them.
- Old, tired and featureless website – These days your website is one of the ways consumers and prospects look into your brand, do thor research and determine if they want to do business with you, it better be current and appealing.
- Nothing unique and different about your brand – Not being unique, not having clear differences, and being the same as your competitors is a bad brand combination.
Conclusion
It’s time for you to enhance your brand’s equity and increase your market position through a pro-active approach to building your brand and achieving your desired outcomes. If you need help, please reach out to a top brand strategy agency, like Brand Iron, where we can help you build your brand equity and even put it into a top notch pitch deck, strategized, designed, and developed by the top pitch deck experts in the industry.
