The importance of a strong brand in today’s competitive business environment cannot be overlooked. Recent statistics from the American Marketing Association show that 89 percent of consumers consider brand popularity while choosing between similar products. Brand is a symbol of distinction; it is your business’s primary point of contact with the outside world.
To create formidable brands, entrepreneurs need to step up on the quality of their products and adapt effective marketing strategies. But is that enough? Not at all; creating a powerful brand is only the beginning. Entrepreneurs ultimately need to measure the effectiveness of their brand and assess whether the brand can be transformed into a market leader.
While there is no definite way of going around measuring brand effectiveness, there are three key indicators of any strong brand.
1. Distinctive
The key to a strong brand is distinctiveness. An entrepreneur should ensure that the brand not only speaks volumes about the organization, but that it creates a unique identity as well; an identity as unique as a fingerprint. In contemporary media circles, this extreme degree of uniqueness would be described as the ‘WOW factor’. Why is this important? It allows a brand to position itself strategically depending on the market segments that it is targeting.
To know whether your brand is distinctive, ask yourself some simple questions. Is there an inherent need within the workforce to push for continuous product development? Are customers always happy? Do we go the extra mile to deliver extra value? If the answer to all these questions is ‘Yes’, then you are certainly moving in the right direction.
2. Differentiable
Although there are a few overlaps in the interpretation of distinctive and differentiable, the latter is more specific to the actual operations of a business. Differentiation is what creates a company’s unique selling point and more importantly, why a customer would rather spend a couple more dollars on your product than on a competitor’s similar product.
One of the easiest ways of knowing whether your brand is differentiable is going through feedback on customer experience. In most cases, organizations with standout customer experience tend to have strong brands. A good example would be computer giant Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HP). According to the 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings, HP emerged the top computing company for customer experience.
3. Defendable
After all is said and done, the ultimate test of your brand’s effectiveness is whether or not it is defendable. Can your brand weather tough times? The best measure to asses this would be customer retention rates. In addition to signaling whether a brand is defendable, customer retention rates also say a lot about customer loyalty. You need to know that you can leverage your brand to maintain liquidity in the hardest of times.
Perhaps the best testament to this would be Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL). Over the past six months, reports on the Cupertino based bigwig have been parsed more than some of our politicians’ speeches. Analysts argue that the iPhone maker’s troubles this year are far from over and that demand for impending products will track downwards. However, even in the face of this negative outlook, loyal Apple fans are still holding on. A recent survey highlights that more than half of American homes have at least one Apple product.
These are the three most efficient ways of measuring brand effectiveness. Entrepreneurs should come up with different ways of enhancing these important elements.