Most major brands and advertisers have systems in place to track and quantify brand health. While the inputs and sophistication of these systems vary, there are several aspects of brand health that nearly everyone can agree are important, including: salience, differentiation, relevance, and loyalty.
Several of these dimensions are appropriate for evaluation via survey research with supportive data coming from qualitative research and panel data. However, truly understanding brand relevance can be a difficult task.
When asked what makes brands relevant, consumers often default to listing category-level drivers such as ‘great taste’ for food brands or ‘high quality’ for durable goods. It can be difficult for consumers to articulate why they intrinsically relate to a brand. Thus, a more robust approach is needed to truly understand what makes your brand relevant and the ever changing dynamics that underlie this.
One of the most powerful tools in understanding brand relevance is the use of predictive analytics to uncover relationships between brand perceptions and purchasing behavior. By using a holistic suite of analytics, you can develop a robust picture of consumer motivations. The use of multiple models allows you to understand three key relationships:
- The relationships between various brand attributes
- The relationship between brand perceptions and future purchase intentions/brand loyalty
- The relationship between brand perceptions and a sale.
This multi-faceted approach will give you a strong understanding of what makes your brand relevant to your target consumers today.
Developing a robust point-in-time approach is an important first step in understanding brand relevance, but understanding how marketplace influences are continually affecting your brand’s relevance is equally important. There are a number of forces that can change the perceived relevance of your brand: your advertising or integrated marketing campaign, competitive campaigns, new product entries in your category and the emergence of new categories, to name a few. Thus, utilizing research that captures the dynamism of relevance is important to gaining a complete understanding of brand health. If you don’t have a complete picture of the marketplace forces impacting this dimension, you don’t have a complete and actionable sense of your brand’s health.
While brand relevance is one of many important aspects of brand health, it is a dimension that is worth an investment in robust analytics to monitor and track. You need to know if any looming forces or changes in messages are threatening to move you closer to irrelevance.
