Ever wonder how to effectively assess your company’s brand equity? Want to know how to enhance its brand equity and track and measure the ROI of your efforts? We thought so. Here’s how.
Understanding Brand Equity
We’re going to just pretend that “Brand Equity” is an unfamiliar term to you, so we can introduce the concept and give you a peek at what it means for you and your company:
Brand Equity Theory
This theory states that a brand’s value goes beyond its functional benefits based on its products or services. It includes:
- Customer loyalty
- Brand awareness
- How the brand is perceived compared to other brands
- The brand association consumers make (quality, trust, innovation, etc.)
Components of brand equity
Before we get into enhancing brand equity in marketing, let’s go back to business school and review:
So this brand equity model starts at the bottom and works its way up. The first steps in your brand identity communicate who you are, then what you are. Then it expresses what you are all about. And finally it leads to the important concept of relationship with the brand, what about you and me? These components of brand equity build your brand familiarity, recognition and thus brand equity. Makes sense, right? So, what’s the big deal?
Why is brand equity important?
We thought you’d never ask. Brand equity is the life blood for your company, brand and your company’s goals and objectives. The more your customers and targeted prospects know about your brand, become familiar with it, feel comfortable with your brand and understand and relate to your brand, the better and more desirable your brand will be. This creates raving fans, drives more leads and opportunities, and creates more desirable financial outcomes.
Assessing Your Current Brand Equity:
Let’s take a look at several ways brands are measuring brand equity to assess the value of their brand equity:
Determine your brand awareness:
First, take a close look in the mirror. Examine your brand awareness by looking at your website traffic, social media engagement, online mentions, branded searches (looking for your brand specifically), customer surveys, etc.
Know your brand association:
This is where you dig a little deeper to analyze social media mentions, brand awareness surveys, customer loyalty, etc.
Understand your brand’s perceived quality:
This one takes a bit more effort, so you’re gonna need the help of a focus group or brand perception survey, asking more specific questions regarding quality and your customers’ brand experience.
Measure your Brand Loyalty:
This is a hot topic that lots of brands measure, using testing tools or methodology like measuring your Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Retention Rate (CRRl, or Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). These are usually done by using customer surveys.
Since measuring these types of brand components can be a bit tricky, many firms reach out and work with a brand strategy agency for help with these types of things. Measuring a brand’s equity is a common branding company service that can be easily worked on with your brand partner. (Yep. That’s us. We got you.)
Challenges in Assessing Brand Equity:
Measuring brand equity isn’t a simple process. Just because your product is selling and your mom likes it doesn’t mean it has good brand equity. Here’s some challenges that brands face when attempting to measure brand equity.
Measuring Brand Equity:
It seems everyone has an opinion about the best way to go about measuring and tracking brand equity, which can be fairly subjective. Measuring brand equity accurately with an agreed-upon methodology and value can be challenging without the assistance of a brand strategy agency.
Subjective measures and outcomes:
Since many measures are subjective, requiring direct customer feedback or focus groups, the results can easily get blown out of proportion either for the good or bad, triggered by raving fans with overly positive feedback or a few critics who are overly outspoken. This makes objectivity as tricky as talking to your child about the beautiful picture they drew for you on the living room wall.
Can consume massive time and resources:
Measuring brand equity can be resource heavy with time you can’t afford to spend and money you’d rather spend elsewhere. Especially if you’re determined to attempt these complex assessments in house, the time involved becomes overwhelming.
Strategies for Enhancing Brand Equity:
So, what do we recommend for clients who are eager to build and enhance their brand equity?
Providing great experiences:
Start by looking at the experiences you’re providing, and determine if those experiences are positive or negative (be brutal!) and determine what can be learned by looking at them.
Building awareness:
Brand awareness can be built through utilizing different social media, advertising online and traditional media mediums, blogging/vlogging, podcasting, digital marketing, etc. as you educate and interact with people about your brand.
Aligning your brand:
Make sure all your branding and marketing imagery, messaging and marketing efforts are aligned with your desired brand voice, tone, and positioning. When all your brand elements are in alignment, the magic happens, greatly increasing your brand recognition and equity.
Enhancing brand equity in marketing:
Don’t underestimate the power of a fully-integrated marketing campaign with all your marketing images and messages aligned and building upon one another. This greatly enhances your brand’s equity.
Leveraging brand equity:
Brand equity is like love between friends, the friendship equity that gives friends leverage to call you for help whenever they move or need a big favor. When consumers people recognize your brand, that is brand equity that you can leverage, lowering the cost of your customer acquisition. A strong brand equity also gives you the ability to cross sell other products or services and thus easily increase your revenue.
Real-Life Examples of Successful Brand Equity Enhancement:
Want to see current examples of brand equity? Check these out.
Enhancing Brand Equity Examples:
The brand formerly known as Twitter has leveraged the powerful brand recognition of X (with PayPal’s predecessor and Space X), and it is now widely accepted and recognized as X, the beginning of a broader marketing strategy to expand (“X-pand?”) into other industries like streaming, payments and gaming.
Enhancing Brand Equity Examples:
A growing trend in enhancing brand equity are collaborations (the cool kids call them “colabs”) to build and enhance brand recognition, multiply results and thus develop brand equity. Take gymnast Livvy Dunne and activewear brand Vouri, for example, working together to build and enhance one another’s brand to successfully develop brand equity for one another—beautifully brilliant!
Measuring the Impact of Brand Equity Efforts:
As mentioned above, brands examine a variety of measurements to discover the true impact of brand equity efforts.
Look at:
Customer and brand experiences
Customer retention
Customer satisfaction
Social media influence
Sales and revenue
When our firm examines a client’s brand equity, we look at how they package and present the brand in their pitch deck and/or capital raise deck. How this comes together is a good indication of how much brand recognition and equity they have. Need help with something similar? There’s good reason “Brand” is in our name. Contact Brand Iron, the pitch deck experts.
Conclusion
Now that you have an understanding of what brand equity is and how to measure it, get to work! Actively build your brand equity to grow the value of your company and brand. We’re here when you need us, and we’re excited to help you grow.
