How do you measure branding?
May 11th, 2006 | Melissa MarronI notice that clients are looking for a better way to measure the effectiveness of branding. They have issues understanding how relevant their company, product, service or concept is in the marketplace. Being able to measure the potential effectiveness of a program before launching a broad initiative or understanding to what level of awareness, leadership, or purchase intent a company currently has with a segment of their audience could save millions of dollars in marketing expenses. This type of intelligence also enables better sales opportunities, shorter sales cycles and higher profit margins. For example, we measure branding success through pre- and post-campaign surveying online to compare the changes, but how do others do it? What type of goals do vendors try and use to measure their branding?
June 2nd, 2006 at 6:33 pm
How do you measure branding? A million dollar question indeed. It’s tricky to put a dollar value on the ROI of branding ad spend. So much so that I personally call ROI as Return On Influence rather than the dreaded Investment
However there are a few KPI’s you can measure as far as measuring it online. Constantly improving KPI’s such as site stickiness (time spent), percentage of returning visitors vs. new visitors, page views per visitor and a few others can give a good insight into the performance of branding ads. However you would need a good web analytics package with secure first party cookies to achieve reliable results.
There are a lot of things you can do, hire an agency to measure the effectiveness’ of your print branding ads (be ready to spend quite a sum here) or just do it yourself on the cheaper side i.e. by providing vanity url to a dedicated landing page and measure the metrics on that page along with click patterns and flow.
However I think some of the existing metrics for measuring branding specially for print ads is flawed. After all a brand is not what you think it is – it’s what your potential customer thinks of it. Point is, not to get the maximum number of eyeballs then conduct a survey if they remember seeing the ad – but what did those relevant eyeballs did when they saw the ad.
July 13th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Another way for evaluating brand recognition is web site A/B testing. Try pitting your existing brand components with alternate versions of logos, taglines, key value/selling propositions, testimonials, headlines, client lists (i.e. group A vs. group B), etc.
When web testing alternate brand components, you’ll want to measure key response metrics such as average time visitors’ spent on the site, pages viewed, % of visitors who viewed > 1 page, conversion rates, etc. These measurements can be made with any robust web analytics or A/B testing solution.
In analysing test results, if visitor behavior is similar across all variations, then the brand recognition is weak. In other words, visitors were no more influenced by the current brand vs. alternative brand components. If there are discernable differences in behavior between test groups, however, then you should question whether your brand is strong (it outperformed the alternates) or alternate components/messages were shown to be more relevant or persuasive to the audience.
Running A/B tests on one’s web site can be an effective way to test and validate both established and new brand components or messaging. Best of all, it takes the guesswork out of decision making because you get the feedback of actual visitors.