If you’re responsible for growing a brand, what are you trying to achieve? What does success look like? Some measure awareness. Others look at penetration. Or campaign results. But here are the five success criteria for brands that we look to use to judge progress over time and for proving brand effectiveness.
Our five success criteria
Five may seem like a lot, but we chose these criteria deliberately because they represent different aspects of how brands should be looking to add value. While all are important, some brands will choose to prioritise one or more of these criteria over others.
We refer to each of these criteria as “shares” because each one is about how much presence you can own as a brand compared with competitors in your chosen sector. As these shares increase and decrease, they can change the affinity, effectiveness, earning power and visibility of your brand and thus your relative competitiveness.
Not all five criteria need to be at the same level in order for a brand to be effective – nor do they need to add up to 100%. But, equally, our view is that you will not succeed as a brand if you have not actively factored all five into your brand marketing objectives to some degree.
Headshare: what customers understand about your brand
Strong brands are simply understood. They define and describe themselves in ways that make sense to their audience. They feel logical and clear. And because of that, people recognise them and know what they do. A brand with strong headshare is one that customers feel empowered to use because they can lucidly articulate why they do so. It could be price, choice, technology … There are rational drivers that justify use and purchase, and that the brand endorses at every turn to position itself as sensible, practical and worthy of consideration.
Headshare matters because customers buy emotionally and justify logically. Understanding your competitiveness as a rational choice is an important way of evaluating how easy it will be for customers to explain to others (and themselves) why they chose your brand.
To evaluate Headshare, ask questions like:
- Is our brand clearly understood?
- Do people know what we offer?
- Is our value proposition competitive?
- Are we in their consideration set?
Heartshare: how customers feel about what you stand for
The most effective brands prompt buyers to react. They tune into emotions that matter to audiences and link them deeply to the brand’s wider identity. Every brand marketer wants their target market to feel something for their brand. There are two defining aspects of this: singularity; and intensity. Iconic brands pursue one emotion. They may do so in different ways, but they are relentless in how they want people to feel about them. And they look to dominate that emotion in their marketplace because their competitiveness hinges on people associating that emotion most strongly with their brand.
Heartshare is not our term. It was coined by Adrienne Bateup-Carlson. But we use it here because it perfectly describes the need for brands to strategise and pursue a specific and competitive connection with their audiences in order to be known, treasured and remembered.
To evaluate Heartshare, ask questions like:
- Do we have a signature emotion?
- Is our brand likeable on that basis?
- Are people inclined to choose us?
- Are our customers loyal?
Eyeshare: what people connect with visually
A brand that is not seen may as well not exist. In a world of noise, exhibitionism, scandal and instant wonders, your brand’s ability to create and build a recognised, consistent and fascinating visual and verbal presence has never been more important. That presence need not be loud or busy. But it must reflect your personality and capture the intrigue of your brand through identity, imagery and storytelling in ways that catch the eye of the people you want looking your way. Recognised brands are powerful visual storytellers. They think through their visual and verbal presence holistically to ensure that everything that is seen and read lines up with the brand’s established codes.
It’s tempting to look at this criteria and reduce it to vanity metrics like impressions or likes. The real success factor though is presence: where your brand is seen; who it is seen by; what the visual language communicates; and how people judge your brand against what they are looking for. Eyeshare is a long-term pursuit for visual dominance, even though each sighting itself may be fleeting.
To evaluate Eyeshare, ask questions like:
- Are we visible in our marketplace?
- Are we easily recognisable?
- Is our visual language consistent?
- How do buyers react to our campaigns?
Market share: your ability to own more than your fair share
Every brand believes it deserves to succeed. But the critical question that often gets missed, or avoided, is how much market share do you need in order to achieve your goals? In other words, what does it take for your brand to have financial, aesthetic and aspirational leverage?
The temptation is to believe that everything hinges on scale. In some sectors, that is absolutely the case. But if you are not in the top tier, your brand strategy needs to reflect how you will counter that. For example, you may choose to be a challenger, in which case you are looking to own where others are vulnerable. Or you may wish to go niche, in which case, you are deliberately shrinking the size of market you cater to in order to compete more meaningfully in that space.
Investopedia defines market share as total company sales divided by total industry sales. But our view is that exceeding your fair share is about setting your sights on claiming a greater portion of the total market value than you would acquire naturally – and knowing what to do with it. The more interesting metric therefore is market share impact: how your share-of-market affects perception and performance.
Chasing market share alone is a dangerous distraction, particularly if you discount heavily to achieve it. But understanding the context within which you operate and taking ownership of as much of that as you need to achieve your objectives is imperative.
To evaluate Market share, ask questions like:
- Do we have enough market share to achieve our objectives?
- Are we impacting the market in ways that advantage us?
- Are we keeping pace with changes in the market?
- Is the market we have chosen the right market for us to be in?
Profit share: your ability to earn more than your fair share
While market share evaluates the brand’s performance against competitors, profit share considers your ability to return above-normal net returns. A key purpose of brands, we believe, is to generate margin. On that basis, a key success indicator for your brand is whether it is delivering you greater net profit than those around you.
A temptation is to just consider revenue growth. There’s nothing wrong with understanding total income of course – particularly as it relates to market share. But if topline increases are essentially being paid for with increased costs, the real gains can be deceptive.
Evaluating comparative profit share enables you to understand how powerful your brand is in enabling you to command pricing beyond what occurs naturally. That margin is not purely attributable to brand of course, but it helps everyone understand the return that comes from astute marketing.
To evaluate Profit share, ask questions like:
- Are we achieving our target levels of margin?
- Are we containing costs responsibly?
- Do our customers consider our pricing fair?
- Do we have a clear pricing strategy linked to our brand strategy?
Tailor these success criteria to your circumstances
There is no universal formula for how these five shares will work best for your brand. How you prioritise them, and which ones you choose to invest in, will come down to performance expectations. We view them as dynamic and inter-related, with a shift in any one criteria needing to be evaluated against likely and possible impacts on the others.
Give each share a status
Different brands will also use different metrics to quantify these shares. For some brands, these metrics will be multi-layered and continually updated. For others, they may be simpler and less frequent. Those metrics may also be internally sourced and/or come from external evaluations. The most important thing is that each metric is broad enough to be measured consistently over time. The other necessity is a response framework, where brand leaders have game plans for what happens as shares progress or if they unexpectedly grow or drop.
We suggest four status to evaluate what’s required:
- Under-powered – this share needs to improve if you are meet your goals
- Appropriate – this share is as it should be
- Excellent – you excel at this share. It represents a strong competitive advantage for you.
- More than you need – you’ve overplayed this criteria (at the expense of other shares). You need to dial this back and reallocate resources elsewhere.
We can help you with proving brand effectiveness
Non-marketers often struggle with understanding the difference that strong brands make to a business. Our five success criteria for brands help frame brands in tangible terms that decision makers can quantify and track.
A helpful way to position brands to leaders is to talk about them as a delivery mechanism for the strategy. Brands build headshare, heartshare and eyeshare through marketing, over time, and the payloads are the market share and profit share required by the business to achieve strategic objectives. Balancing the five shares is about ensuring that the investment and the returns are well understood by all parties.
Setting the criteria that prove brand effectiveness can be a powerful stand-alone piece of work in its own right. Or it can prompt the discussions needed to set your future advantage by developing your brand strategy. Our Plan to Thrive is an effective way to strategise your brand at an organisational or product level based on achieving the five success criteria.
If you are looking to explain to decision-makers how they can evaluate the success of a brand, a strategy session is an effective way to start that. It’s a forum to discuss a good mix of financial and non-financial measures. If your brands are under-performing or have more potential than you are realising, please take a look at how we can help you define your future.
Acknowledgements
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash