PERSPECTIVES

15 success elements to include on your Brand Report Card

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Despite appearances, brands are complex. They exist to be quickly and easily recognised, and yet the work required to make them perform effectively is considerable and diverse. So how do you know if your brand is up to scratch? Here are the elements we recommend you include on your Brand Report Card.

The purpose of a Brand Report Card is to assess whether your brand is indeed one you can have confidence in, or whether there is more work to do to make that happen. Essentially, it’s an executive summary of the key attributes of your brand and how effectively they contribute to your brand working to its capability.

The six parts of brand success

To understand why a Brand Report Card is useful, let’s start by defining what it takes to achieve brand success:

A confident brand

That is delivering value to the business

Because it is well supported

Robustly strategised

Beautifully expressed

Skilfully managed

And effectively delivered.

A brand that lacks one or more of these success factors will probably struggle to perform to expectations. But too often, these factors are conflated to judge the brand as a whole, without looking more closely at which factors are working well and where the brand may be lagging.

Without a confident brand, marketers have very little to build with. Brand forms the basis for how a business makes its presence felt in its marketplace. If you don’t have that, then the business is dependent on more fickle factors to meet its ambitions.

The 15 success elements included here are in the order we choose to assess them. You may of course choose a different order or exclude any elements that you deem less important or hard to assess.

Your Brand Report Card

  1. Definition

The brand is well defined, in terms of purpose, vision, mission and values. Every brand needs a powerful sense of self in order to fulfil its goals. It’s important that the core brand DNA is ambitious, specific and provides clear focus for what your brand is looking to achieve. Your definition is exactly that: your reason for being. It sets out why you have chosen to enter a market and why you intend to generate a significant presence as a brand

  1. Respect

The brand is valued within the business for what it delivers. It may seem strange to have this element so high on the Brand Report Card. But it’s up here because every brand needs a clear mandate to operate, and for that to happen, the brand must be valued throughout the business for its contributions. Without respect, brands are often relegated to cost status, and their presence and the investment required to keep them current is continually questioned.

  1. Audience

The brand understands its market(s). It’s critical that brand leaders are laser focused on the audience for the brand. Knowing who they are and understanding what motivates them is crucial to ensuring your brand feels valuable and relevant. In so many sectors, too many brands are competing for the same (broad) audience with bland products that feel interchangeable. The challenge for every brand leader is to find an audience for their brand that is sizeable, valuable, motivated and under-served.

  1. Relevance

Brands live or die on their offer. Knowing the audience, a brand must excel at developing and delivering products and services that surprise, engage and involve. For consumer brands, that’s often about reflecting, or foreshadowing, the wider culture and developing offers that are lifestyle-compatible.

  1. Distinction

The brand itself is distinctive. That’s harder than it looks in marketplaces where category brands increasingly seem, feel and sound the same. It’s tempting to succumb to uniformity in the name of recognition and sector alignment. But a robust brand achieves what Josh Lowman refers to as “categorical difference”. It does enough to be an EV, for example, without behaving and marketing itself like every other EV in the market. That’s particularly important – and difficult – in sectors where the core elements that make up the offer are set or limited. Increasingly, personality defines who is noticed and who remains overlooked.

  1. Availability

Distribution is a critical brand signal. A brand that doesn’t deliver is a brand doomed to failure. It’s critically important for brands to read the room in terms of channels and demand, and deliver what’s expected, when and where. Of course that’s about logistics and inventory control, but it’s also about being seen (and found) in the right places. Smaller consumer brands competing in larger markets, for example, are quickly judged on who has chosen to distribute them.

  1. Value

The brand upholds a pricing strategy based on how the audience perceive the brand’s worth. We believe a key objective for most brands, especially in crowded and commoditising markets, is to deliver a higher level of margin than the market is pre-disposed to give you. Brands add value, and therefore profit, because they elevate what people believe they are paying for. Without a brand, your product’s pricing, and perception of value, is governed by what the market happens to believe it is worth at that time.

  1. Position

To achieve that perception of value, a brand needs to be clearly and accurately positioned for the marketplace and against competitors. It must occupy a space – or role – relative to other participants. That position should align directly with how the brand defines itself. The goal is, where possible, to put “clear air” between where your brand is positioned in the sector and where others are seen. But, and this is important, that position must be viable, credible and, preferably, expandable.

  1. Direction

The brand knows where it is heading – and its direction aligns with the wider business intentions of the organisation. The strategy focuses on the brand as a revenue and strategy contributor, not just a marketing communicator.

  1. Narrative

There is a compelling story to tell, and that brand story is structured across a range of timeframes – from the brand’s long arc story (the story it is looking to tell over time) all the way through to the more immediate and daily content snaps that the brand releases socially to keep people interested. The narrative itself also needs to be capable of being told in interesting ways to different audiences.

  1. Experience

The brand delivers in ways that people remember and talk about. It does this by shaping and delivering brand-specific experiences across channels that people recognise and engage with. It’s tempting to think that experience is only something that consumer-facing brands need to think about. But the experience of interacting with a brand is very much something that business-to-business brands need to think about. If the experience of working with you is not memorable and valuable, there is less inclination to work with you again.

  1. Recognition

The brand is seen. And that’s because there are strong and present brand codes in place that define crucial identifiers for the brand in public: a powerful name; strong identity system; ownable language. Everything about the way you present yourself as a brand is consistent and telegraphs who you are instantly and effectively to your audiences. Martin Lindstrom once compared this to shards of Coke – if a Coke bottle breaks, you can pick up any piece and recognise the brand. Your brand should aspire to that level of recall.

  1. Structure

The brand portfolio and hierarchy make sense. Customers won’t necessarily see this, but understanding your brand architecture and applying the rules of that structure consistently and confidently helps people see a brand, and the products within that product, in a context that makes sense. Brand architecture is all about mental breadcrumbs. It links or separates brands and brand lines in order to deliver clarity.

  1. Campaign-ability

The brand has what it takes to come alive in communications. Although there is much more to your brand than what it looks like and what it says, those are the most visible elements to your audience on a day to day basis. Campaigns are how major elements of your story unfold publicly, and you will need a brand with the confidence and substance to be interesting, no matter which channels you use.

  1. Delivery

This relates back to #2 on our list. The brand is delivering what’s expected for the business and is thus proving its value. Different brands will incorporate different factors here, depending on the maturity and nature of the brand. Physically placed brands, for example, will want to include metrics like traffic and sales volumes, whereas digitally-driven brands may want to monitor searchability and conversions.

How to organise your Brand Report Card

We suggest ranking your brand in two ways. First, assess each of these elements internally to determine how leaders, marketers and indeed the wider culture measure the brand they work with. Then, do the same thing externally – either through workshops, or by looking at what your brand research and results are telling you.

We use a points basis. So, for example:

1 – Doesn’t exist

2 – Present, but weak

3 – Passable but unremarkable

4 – Strong, but could still improve

5 – As strong as it can be

Incorporating the two perspectives means your Brand Report Card is marked out of 150 (15 x 5 x 2). This “State of the Brand” not only provides you with an analysis of where your brand is strong and where it still needs to improve, it also lets you see the differences between internal and external assessments and where there are perception gaps that need to be closed.

(If you’re wondering how to externally assess 2. Respect and 15. Delivery, these can be based on how external parties perceive this.)

Applying the findings

While some include growth, brand equity and reputation as success factors in their own right in their brand performance model, we don’t. Instead we identify all three as rewards generated for brands with a strong Report Card.

While many brands will start by completing their Brand Report Card and then working out the implications for growth, brand equity and reputation, it is of course perfectly feasible to work the other way. If you have identified problems with growth, brand equity or reputation, you can use the Brand Report Card to specify if, how or where the brand itself is contributing – or not contributing – to those.

Indeed, a Brand Report Card can be used at different times to assess different things.

For example, we often use this Card at the beginning of a rebranding process to determine why the brand needs to change. But it can also form the basis for annual reviews. Or for workshops  to determine where specific help is needed.

The brand may be under-powered in terms of its Definition. In which case, you may want to work on purpose, vision and values. Or it may need a stronger story. You may want to investigate that aspect further through our Long Arc brand storytelling workshop.

If you’re interested in seeing how strong your brand is, but would rather not score your own Card, we can undertake a Brand Report Card on your behalf and report back findings and recommended next actions.

Acknowledgements

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

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