Brand auditing tracks the impact of your brand. It’s also an awesome management tool.
Peter Drucker apparently never said “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, but let’s not let truth get in the way of a great slogan. The truth, for purposes of this post, is that successful brand activation depends an awful lot on the metrics you employ to quantify it.
To build your brand effectively into the fabric of the organization, you’ve got to have objective data showing how closely you’ve been able to align internal operations with what customers expect. Brand metrics lets you assess your brand’s impact on business performance. But that’s just the start. The same data also provides actionable feedback for sales, product development, HR, customer service and course marketing.
A balanced brand scorecard
As tempting as it might be to create a simple brand performance score, it’s not a good idea to pack all brand metrics into a single number. Brands are just too complex. Any attempt to combine various data sources and weight them appropriately inevitably becomes arbitrary and misleading.
A better approach is to create a balanced scorecard that looks at brand from several different angles over time. Individual metrics can be tracked separately and particular strengths and weaknesses of the brand addressed as needed. Here are four key areas a brand scorecard should measure:
- Financial metrics: Basic measures of business performance such as revenue, profits, market share, etc.
- Internal metrics: Evaluation of operational performance, including efficiency, operating costs, utilization of assets, sales performance, etc.
- Customer metrics: Measurements of brand awareness, preference, customer satisfaction, loyalty rates, NPS, etc.
- Culture metrics: Assessment of employee brand understanding and commitment, motivation, alignment of personal and team goals to brand objectives, etc.
Consider building a brand performance dashboard that presents metrics like these in a format for easy reference and regular updating. It will to a great job of telling you how well your brand activation program is contributing to the business. A well-managed brand is a well-measured one.
Looking beyond brand performance, the brand dashboard we’ve described here will obviously serve as a powerful tool for overall business strategy and management. Think of this a metaphor for the role of brand activation can play in your business as a whole.
Brand is strategy brought to life. Or more precisely, brand is what links strategy to action. Brand activation? It’s the process of making your business strategy a powerful driver of success.
