Factors to Consider When Determining Brand Health

In today’s world of numerous data and changing consumer sentiment, it’s become increasingly difficult to manage brand health and devise an effective marketing strategy and a content marketing strategy to go along with that. Be it a large multinational company or a small startup, you’re constantly interacting with your consumers through traditional sales and marketing, and more so nowadays through social media. Your brand health is being continuously strengthened or weakened by your interactions with and exposure to your consumers. This is why it is important to monitor some key brand metrics over time to get a better sense of where your product stands and how people feel about it:

Volume: Yes, you can do quarterly, or annual studies to measure consumer perceptions about your product on a given sample. With 81% of US adults using social media today, you can now open this up to a lot more people and generate more brand impressions.

Velocity: As mentioned above, brand-tracking studies are done too infrequently. This makes it hard to determine the impact of real-time consumer opinion. A good example of this is Kenneth Cole, which had a 64% decline in brand equity in just 3 days. This shows that there needs to be a better system that can track consumer opinions more closely and frequently.

Visibility: Given the internet and social media, consumers can now present their unfiltered views about your product that can be seen by other consumers. Make sure to track this factor when considering your brand’s health – how visible your brand is, who’s talking about it, and about what.

Volatility: Good examples of the volatility in brand sentiment are Gap and Starbucks, and how differently they approached consumer sentiment after having changed their long established logos. Gap, after receiving negative response about its new logo online, panicked and retracted to its old logo within a week! Starbucks, on the other hand, was better equipped with years of consumer sentiment knowledge built from fostering intimate relationships with consumers through communities like My Starbucks Idea. As a result, Starbucks handled the situation better and asked its consumer to trust it about the decision. So, it’s important to track your brand sentiment volatility not only when examining your brand health, but also to better manage your customer relationships over time.

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