How Healthy Is Your Brand?

Autumn 2020

New for 2020

At TLF, we’ve been running surveys for longer than most of us care to remember. We’re experts in customer satisfaction, and tackle a multitude of different survey topics day in, day out.

The world we immerse ourselves in, that of market research, is ever-changing. With new technology comes new ways in which we can interact with people, and that changes peoples’ expectations and perceptions of what constitutes meaningful research and actionable insight.

With this in mind, we went out to our clients and asked them – what do we not currently offer that you would find useful? Looking at the responses, one thing emerged as a very clear need: an easy way to monitor brand health for brands who might not be able to afford a full-blown brand tracker.

What do we mean by brand health, and why might you want to track it?

Why track your brand’s health?

Never has brand loyalty moved at such a fast pace. In this digital age, where consumers are bombarded with brands every moment of the day, and brands are accepted or dismissed with just the swipe of a finger or click of a mouse, it has never been more relevant to track your brand’s performance, and, perhaps more importantly, take action from the findings.

Sometimes it can be overwhelming to know where to start with tracking your brand, so we have done the hard work for you and whittled it down to the key questions you really need to know:

Usage & Awareness – how aware are consumers of your brand, and how often do they use/see/purchase it?

Customers vs. Non-customers – how do results differ between these demographics, and how can you turn the latter into the former?
Brand reputation – measure the reputation of your brand across a myriad of factors
Consumer opinion – what do consumers really think of your brand, and how do you stack up against the competition?
Customer expectations – what expectations come with your brand, and how do these change across sectors/products?
Likelihood to purchase – how likely are they to buy your product/service? And what will affect this?

What does it look like?

To show you what a brand tracker can do for you, here are some of the outputs from our new Brand Health Package.

We’d always start with a summary of who was surveyed, how long the survey was open for and what the incidence rate was. Not essential for the results, but useful to see the demographics, especially if you want to track how your brand health changes over time across different groups.

You’ll want easy-to-read figures on, among other things; gender, age brackets, socio-economic groups and regional breakdowns, along with any other data splits you need.

Then we get into the meat of the report, starting with the biggie – brand awareness.

How aware are consumers of your brand? We ask them both unprompted and prompted awareness to gather the fairest findings. These results are then analysed and compared to your brand’s competition:

This general awareness gives a good starting point to understanding your brand’s health. Depending on your requirements, you will then get this broken down by particular demographics. In the example to the right (Fig 2), by age.
After establishing your brand’s awareness levels, we’ll turn to brand usage. We measure this using two categories:

Brand Usage – have they heard of your brand but never used them, heard of your brand and used them in the past, or heard of your brand and currently use them?
Brand Consideration – Is your brand something they would never consider, might consider, one of two or three brands they’d consider, or the ONLY one they’d consider?
At this point you’ll have seen just how aware consumers are of your brand; did your brand spring to their minds unaided, did they require some prompting, or had they never heard of it at all? With the sample who were aware of your brand, you now also know how many of them use your brand, and how likely they are to consider it in the future (Fig 3).

We can then look at awareness alongside consideration, a really useful visual tool to see how you stack up compared to your brand’s main competition (Fig 4).

Now we look at satisfaction – how satisfied are your brand’s customers, and also, equally as important, how satisfied are your competitors’ customers?

A simple, but reliable, measure to gauge brand health - satisfied customers will talk and act positively about your brand, and vice-versa (Fig 5).

Another popular indicator of how your brand is perceived, and one with strong links to customer loyalty, is NPS, or Net Promoter Score. Using a scale from 0 to 10 (0 being ‘not likely to recommend’ and 10 being ‘very likely to recommend’), how likely are they to recommend your brand to friends and family? A high NPS is often associated with brand loyalty and revenue growth.

The NPS section gives you a detailed breakdown of your brand’s overall NPS score – namely, how many ‘promoters’ your brand has (how many consumers scored 9 or 10), how many ‘passives’ it has (those who scored 7 or 8), and how many ‘detractors’ it has (how many scored 0 to 6). These are the figures that are then converted into your brand’s final NPS score (Fig 6).

Now there’s some solid data and understanding behind your brand’s health. We’ve measured awareness, usage, consideration, satisfaction and NPS. All valuable pieces of insight in their own right, but usefully collated together in one report, prepared in detailed, easy to understand charts (that often paint a stronger picture than numbers alone), that can be run again, and again (if required) to really track your brand’s health over time, for example;
before and after a major advertising campaign.

But the report doesn’t end there. Now we delve deeper into consumers’ emotional connections to your brand, after all, everything derives from emotions. Emotions create attitudes, which in turn drive behaviours, which ultimately lead to which brands people choose to use, trust and promote. The Brand Image Statements section of the report covers all of these emotional connections in detail, and compares your brand against your competition on each metric.

First, we start with brand association - what words and phrases are associated with your brand? Examples include:

[Your brand] has a good reputation
[Your brand] is known for good customer service
[Your brand] values their customers
[Your brand] keeps their promises
[Your brand] does the right thing ethically

Then we probe what words consumers associate with your brand, for example:

Modern
Technical
Experts
Outdated
Slow
Innovative
Customer focused

Again, this is also compared against your brand’s competition.

The final portion of the Brand Health report asks consumers to rate your brand on a whole host of different factors. A really useful measure to see what the public think of your brand at an expressive level, across multiple emotional drivers, and how you compare to your competition.
For example:

Brand affinity – how do consumers rate your brand on a scale from ‘love the brand’ to ‘hate the brand’?
Brand differentiation – how is your brand rated from ‘same as other brands’ to ‘different to the competition’?
Brand uniqueness – on the scale, how is your brand rated from ‘follow others’ up to ‘unique and sets trends’?
Brand empathy – where your brand
is rated on a couple of scales: how
much does it meet customers’ needs,
and how much does it care about its customers.

Finally, we finish with brand relevance, which is strongly linked to brand loyalty, brand influence, and to a lesser degree brand cost – more relevant brands can command higher prices. This is measured on a scale from ‘out of date’ to ‘progressive’, and is also compared to your competition:

Getting the data

All brand managers need to know this kind of information, but many are not in a position to get it. It can be hard to justify the investment needed for such a task, which is why it’s essential to find a cost-effective solution.

We’ve developed a Brand Health Package on our consumer panel to act like an MOT for your brand, generating all the outputs you’ve seen in this article. If you want to know more, why not drop us an e-mail or give us a call? We’re here to help, and look forward to speaking to you!