Is Your Brand Performing Like It Needs to?
One of the most important things you can do as a founder or CEO is track the performance of your brand.
A brand isn’t simply the branding you put on posters. It’s so much more than your logo. Your brand is made up of every decision you make that affects how customers relate to your business. It’s made up of the price point you pick for your products, and the quantity and quality customers get for that price. What your customer service staff say when they pick up the phone to a confused customer affects your brand. It’s not just the advertising you put out in a conscious attempt to shape your brand, it’s where that advertising is seen; which areas host your billboards, which newspapers carry your print adverts, which websites serve your digital ads.
When a brand is functioning well, it’s the best asset your business has; it’s like a beacon signaling to customers somewhere they can spend their money and get exactly what they need, run by people like them who will make them feel at home.
When a brand isn’t working well, when different bits of your business are pulling against each other, undermining your message, it’s ineffective at best. At worst, it could be turning away customers who would otherwise be spending their money with you. Tracking your brand means you know whether your decisions are helping to strengthen your brand or undermine it, allowing you to course correct before a small error becomes a fatal one.
Working with a market research agency could be worth the investment. They don’t just give you access to specialized market research tools – like brand tracking surveys – and the expertise needed to interpret them, they also have the reach to get data from customers who haven’t engaged with your brand yet! If you do your own market research, you can only reach people who have already stepped through your doors or browsed your website: people already interested in your brand. If you want to expand, you need to know why your brand isn’t appealing to other people!
Those brand tracker surveys ask the respondents to rank your brand against your rivals in the industry, and then dig down into why – do they see others as more reliable? Relatable? Offering better value?
The insights you can derive from these surveys don’t just tell you when you’re at fault, they help to identify opportunities: if support for a competing brand is crumbling, some ads targeted at their existing customers may win them over to your business, and prove the value of your brand.
