How Healthy Is Your Brand?
How Healthy Is Your Brand?
Tuesday, 14 February 2006 09:01
As the year heads towards its logical festive conclusion, it is that time when many of us take stock of our gains and losses of the past twelve months writes TOM SITATI in this December 2005 piece, first published in the Research Solutions e-newsletter
As the year heads towards its logical festive conclusion, it is that time when many of us take stock of our gains and losses of the past twelve months. Brands also need to do the same. Writing in the Harvard Business Review of January – February 2000, Kevin Lane Keller, a Professor of Marketing and author of Strategic Brand Management was of the opinion that “Building and properly managing brand equity has become a priority for companies of all sizes in all types of industries, in all types of markets.
After all, from strong brands flow customer loyalty and profits. The rewards of having a strong brand are clear.” While brand management involves running each product or service as a separate entity, the health of individual brands is inextricably linked with the overall health of the corporation. Let us first make the clear distinction between brand equity as mentioned by Professor Keller and brand health, which is the area I wish to address. Brand Equity, according to the Landor Lexicon is the value of the brand in its holistic sense to its owners as a corporate asset while brand health refers to a more qualitative assessment of a brand’s adherence to its strategic direction.
How does one go about monitoring the health of a brand? No meaningful discussion on brand health is complete without mentioning brand audits. Brand audit exercises are designed to assess the health of a given brand. Two checks are generally applied. First is the brand inventory that consists of a detailed internal description of exactly how the brand has been marketed. Second is the brand exploratory which involves a thorough external investigation through focus groups or other appropriate data collection methodology which reveals what the brand does and means to consumers.Market leaders may be tempted to believe that they don’t need to monitor the health of their brands.
This overconfidence and complacency should be guarded against as it could lead to otherwise healthy brands loosing their luster over time, deteriorating in health and eventually dying. A brand is much like the human body which checks itself and triggers signals of ill health while regularly requiring check ups administered by a medical practitioner for seemingly benign symptoms of ill health that the body may be incapable of detecting.In the late 1980s, Disney became concerned that some of its characters were being used inappropriately and thus becoming overexposed.
To determine just how bad the problem was Disney undertook an extensive brand audit. First, during the brand inventory, managers compiled a list of all available Disney products and third party promotions in stores worldwide. At the same time, as part of a brand exploratory, Disney launched its first ever consumer research study to investigate how consumers felt about the Disney brand. Did Disney really have to wait for a downward trend in profits to institute a check on the health of its brand? What was Disney relying on for all those previous decades in order to assess the health of its brand? Did Disney care whether its brand was healthy or not in the first place? Perhaps the giant had begun to sleep on the job but was lucky that no real competition was in sight to swoop in and make hay while the giant’s sun failed to shine. Anyway, back to Mickey Mouse and company’s visit to the brand doctor (or perhaps more appropriately, the brand vet), the results of the brand inventory were, to say the least, both startling and a revelation to senior managers.
The Disney products were on so many products and marketed in so many ways that it was difficult to understand how or why many of the decisions had been made at all! The consumer study revealed that people lumped all product endorsements together as they considered Disney as simply Disney, regardless of whether they saw the characters in films or heard them in recordings or associated them with theme parks. These results demonstrated what brand consultants have gone hoarse repeating at the top of their voices for years on end, “All touch points where the consumer interfaces with the brand have an impact on the brand”. "The rewards of having a strong brand are clear." The Disney characters' wide exposure was beginning to dilute the brand as consumers began feeling that Disney was exploiting its name inappropriately.
Disney’s involvement in so many endorsement deals had made the brand appear to be hawking everything from diapers to cars, not a good image for such an established brand. These findings resulted in Disney setting up a team to better manage the brand and ensure that the core meaning of the brand was maintained while retaining a consistency that it is incumbent upon any brand to maintain if it is to connect with its audience.Interbrand, a leading global brand agency has developed a model for brand valuation using the following parameters: Market, Stability, Leadership, Profit trend, Support, Geographical spread and Protection. A weighting is used for each of the factors to arrive at overall brand valuation. The Interbrand model does have some elements worth considering when gauging brand health.
I would like to consider just two, consistency in meaning and marketing support. My reason for choosing the two stems from the divergent assertions from two schools of thought, one asserting that that brands reside in the hearts and minds of consumers and the other that brands are corporate property and it is up to the corporations to manipulate the brands in whichever way they see best so as to reap maximum profits. A brand, by its very definition, must be unique and therefore no measurement of brand health would be viable without first determining to what extent the unique identity and meaning of a given brand has permeated the market or consumers. Several brands are guilty of achieving ubiquity in brand recognition without achieving consistency in meaning.
The entire world having heard of a brand doesn’t automatically mean that the brand is healthy especially if consumers associate several different meanings with the same brand. If your brand has several different meanings to different audiences then it is definitely not getting the single brand message it should be conveying across and is thus suffering from ill health. The converse is of course true. A healthy brand must communicate one personality to everyone who comes into contact with it through whichever touch points.The second indicator of brand health is through determining the level of effective marketing support it receives. Whether it is through advertising or other forms of communication, a brand that fails to stand out and claim its unique space is threatened with drowning in the sea of oblivion like many a forgotten brand.
For a brand to remain relevant and thus healthy it requires continuous quality nurturing and like any healthy human relationship, meaningful and consistent communication is key.Several other suggestions on determining brand health could be put forward but they will probably fall into the above two categories which cover both internal and external influences on a brand. Perhaps it is time you found out how healthy your brand really is before it’s too late and you are forced to carry out major surgery or organize a funeral! On second thoughts, that brand health check could wait for the new year lest the results remove the merry from “merry Christmas!” I plan to be around to remind you.Email:
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First publised in the Research Solutions Newsletter, December 2005 http://www.ressol.co.ke
