Editor’s note: Joel Rubinson is the president and founder of Rubinson Partners, a New York marketing research consulting company.
Many use the terms brand equity and brand health interchangeably; they shouldn’t.
Brand equity refers to the size of a brand. A brand with high brand equity has lots of customers, big market share and usually generates lots of profit. However, there is no guarantee that the big brand will stay big or that it won’t gobble up increasing advertising and promotion to hold its share. The future of the brand is what brand health is about. Take two brands – Facebook and Yahoo. Both have lots of brand equity today but clearly the stock price trajectory of the two brands is different. Yahoo … big brand but healthy? Not so much.
So, to understand the distinction between brand equity and brand health, let’s create some out of the box thinking. Let’s think about brand health using a synectics-style metaphorical excursion, where the group investigates a related question in a seemingly unrelated topic area, then force-fits the insights back to the top area of interest.
Consider the question of how a pet owner determines if their dog is healthy. If the dog is healthy it:
- has a normal appetite;
- comes when you call it;
- looks like the breed it is;
- heals fast;
- grows into its paws to normal size;
- has a bright, shiny coat;
- doesn’t have accidents in the house; and
- has a cold, wet nose.
So, following the metaphor, here are the signs that your BRAND is healthy, and how the marketer can determine this.
| Dog is healthy if: | Brand is healthy if: | Metrics |
| Has a normal appetite | Brands “eat” advertising and promotion support. If the brand needs to increase marketing support, especially promotion support, to maintain market share it’s not a healthy sign | Monitor the ratio of advertising and promotion spending to sales. |
| Comes when you call it | Does your brand come when consumers call? Are they calling it? Is the marketing team listening and responding? | Social media metrics: conversation volume, sentiment, numbers of customer complaints expressed via social and percent satisfactorily addresses.Digital metrics: trademark search, Web site activity. |
| Looks likes the breed it is | Does your brand have the meaning to consumers it intends to have? Is it positioned as intended? | Identify key themes the brand is positioned on. Measure these both via attribute ratings and social media conversations under those themes. |
| Heals fast | Good brands can receive bad news that, in an era of social media, can turn into massive body blows in an instant. One of the most powerful signs of brand equity is that your customers will forgive you; is your brand bouncing back? | Brand health metrics from continuous surveys and social media sentiment analysis. |
| Puppies need to grow into their paws to normal size | Is your brand growing the way it should? Are you aware of the geometry of a brand, the signs across multiple information streams that it has grown to full size? For example, high penetration or trial that is not supported by commensurate customer retention means the brand will stop growing short of its full size. | Compare your brand to competitors on a variety of key metrics to create normative relationships and assess your metrics in that context to determine if your brand is at, above, or below the regression line of, for example, market share and repeat rate. |
| Has a bright shiny coat | Dogs’ coats shine, making them attractive from a distance. In the era of shopper marketing, nothing could be more important than having your brand jump off the shelf and tells shoppers in an instant what it is about. | Measure your brand performance at key stages in the path to purchase. Are you converting consideration into purchase at point of purchase as effectively as other brands? |
| Doesn’t have accidents | Well, no brand team wants to be fighting fires and cleaning up after the brand. Brands are about trust and therefore consistency. You should be able to have exactly the brand experience you expect, or better. If your brand has inconsistent quality or train wrecks it will keep the brand team on defense. | Monitor the experiences that consumers have with your brands and if each experience is adding to or subtracting from brand equity. |
| Cold wet nose | Touching your dog’s nose regularly is a way of tracking if it is healthy or if you have to look further. In this digital age, track your brand in all layers of consumer expression: surveys, social media, search, activity in owned media, etc. | Combine all of the metrics above, and others, into a coherent dashboard with data coming from a variety of relevant sources, streaming continuously rather than on a project schedule. Do NOT restrict yourself to surveys. |
So, we’re not talking about the size of the dog, we’re talking about if it’s healthy. Brand health is critical to understand and measure because it is predictive of the future. A big brand that is unhealthy won’t stay that big for long.
Marketers need to identify and monitor all signs that a brand is healthy and growing which increasingly means mining digital and social signals.