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Protecting Your Brand: Always-On Check Up

By: Ho Paik San,

Associate Insights Director

Isentia Malaysia

The best way to maintain your health is to take proactive steps in protecting it. In addition to a healthy lifestyle, regular health checks are equally as important for maintaining your overall well-being. Health checks are meant to help catch any potential issues early and spot warning signs that we might not have noticed ourselves.

Hold on a minute! Before you start thinking that you have landed at the wrong page, keep calm and read on. You are right where you are supposed to be.

The truth is, the idea of a brand’s health is not too different from your health.

 

What is Brand Health

Brand health is a measure of how well a company or brand delivers the product or service attributes that it promises its customers. Simply put, brand health is a set of metrics that indicate how well your brand performs.

A healthy brand is one that consistently delivers high quality product or service that leads to positive and differentiated customer experiences.

 

Potential Brand Health Risks

Your brand could risk poor health due to many reasons. Here are some of the potential problems:

• Your brand is selling in a sunset industry or segment and has failed to keep up with evolving customer needs
• Your brand has been expanding into too many markets thus losing its niche
• Your brand has neglected to manage negative comments on a timely manner that has contributed to damaging the brand’s reputation
• Your employees are disconnected with the company or brand’s vision leading to poor work culture and constant turnover

As the market becomes saturated with a growing number of “same same but different” brands competing for a slice of the same pie, brand loyalty becomes scarce as customers are presented with more choices.

Therefore, risk assessment is all about considering what the customers and employees expect from your brand.

 

Manage Your Brand Health

Tracking brand health is about framing the big picture that defines the optimal customer experience based on insights gathered from both quantitative and qualitative data.

These are some of the metrics that you can consider when analysing and measuring your brand health:

 

• Brand awareness

A healthy brand tends to enjoy high brand awareness and recall along with positive consumer sentiment. If your prospective customers are not aware of the brand, they cannot and will not consider it. A social listening tool can provide you with a quick and reliable method to collect social media buzz that is relevant to your brand. By evaluating the share-of-voice of the conversation that your brand dominates in comparison to your competitors will provide you with a quick snapshot of how popular (or otherwise) your brand is.

 

• Brand reputation

Consistency is key in building and maintaining a good brand reputation. It means being consistent in delivering high quality product or service, communicating your brand messages, and attending and responding to customers’ concerns. This includes listening to feedback from the customers either through market research or social media. The latter, through a social listening platform, can provide you with an instant overview of the consumers’ sentiment and how they perceive your brand. Negative comments can allow your brand to spot and address issues in time before they morph into uncontrollable crises. Positive and neutral comments, on the other hand, can provide your brand with valuable feedback on the things that are working well, who your brand advocates (and detractors) are, and where opportunities lie for improvements.

 

• Brand positioning

Keeping a close tab on consumer sentiment and their conversations especially in the social media can provide your brand with an up-to-date view of customer needs and demands. As customers’ needs and wants shift, so too are demands for products and services. Brand positioning that has worked in the past may need to be refreshed to ensure the brand’s messages remain relevant and are effective to differentiate the brand from the competition.

 

• Employee engagement

Brands are usually eager to look outside and neglect to check their own backyards. Employees are the backbone of a company. The more engaged your employees are, the more they will put in their hearts and souls into what they do. Their passion and dedication will shine through in the way they interact with the customers and other stakeholders. They will automatically become the company and brand’s advocates, promoting the product or service to their network of contacts. Disgruntled employees, on the other hand, add no value to the brand’s image and reputation, and can sometimes fuel unfavourable publicity for the brand.

Take the guesswork away by adopting a systematic approach to checking your brand health. The metrics don’t lie. Without them, you will not be able to conclude if your brand is well or otherwise.

Media intelligence companies like Isentia offer brands with a social listening platform that efficiently collects data and provides detailed analysis and competitive benchmarking that review the share-of-voice by buzz volume and sentiment by brands. In addition, a deep dive into the contents will provide your brand with an overview of how relevant your current set of brand messages are and spot emerging trends that your brand can leverage on to facilitate future launches and innovations. Check in with Isentia to schedule a check up for your brand health today!