How Do Companies Traditionally Measure Brand Health, And What Is The Future?
How do companies traditionally measure brand health, and what is the future?
Brand health has been an important aspect of running a business for all of human history, whether or not people have called it by that name. Brand health simply means the overall standing of your brand in the market. It combines brand perception, brand awareness, brand reputation, and really any angle from which you choose to look at a brand. Back in 2007, far enough back that the iPhone 1 was still a novel concept, MIT studies were already finding the statistical significance of brand health and how it directly affects sales and business performance. However, these studies, and really any brand research done by companies or institutions, could only utilise tools such as surveys and focus groups for “data”.
Surveys and focus groups have traditionally involved asking questions such as “how likely are you to recommend this brand” or “which brands do you think of when you think of this industry?”. Off the back of this information, businesses would get 1-10 scales and “scores” that apparently reflect how consumers feel about their brands. While that was about as effective as a smart business could hope for last century, the global tech boom and growing prevalence of the internet has simply blown those solutions out of the water.
Fast forward to 2022
Fast forward to 2022, and we not only have the vast ocean of data available from social media and other online sources, but we have the means to measure and monitor it. Instead of asking those 100 randomly selected consumers a series of arbitrary questions about your brand, companies can use tools to analyse what every single person who has ever said something about their brand or industry has to say. Traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups are largely becoming, if they aren’t so already, a thing of the past. New social listening technology allows businesses to monitor, measure, and respond to the data on their brand’s health from social media, news websites, blogs, review websites, and more.
While the sheer amount of data can be intimidating, there is a clear solution. Businesses can leverage the ever-evolving power of machine learning and AI to sort through the masses of tweets, clicks, and articles and take away actionable insights. Whether that is counting and comparing the number of online mentions of your brand, or analysing the sentiment and emotion of how consumers talk about your brand, there is a world of powerful information at any ambitious business’ fingertips.
Moving forward
What does the future hold for measuring brand health? At Frankly, the future for us looks like forward-thinking businesses that use what’s at their disposal. By asking the right questions and knowing what to do with the answers, businesses can truly meet their potential. With helpful, clean data and intelligent dashboarding, we see businesses taking power into their own hands and steering their brand the way they want to. The same 2007 MIT studies mentioned earlier found that businesses are far too passive and narrow in how they look at brand health. Although the technology has advanced, we still think too many decision-makers are missing out on a key part of their growth.
