How Healthy is Your Brand?

Your brand is your business’ most vital asset. It’s the way your customers understand what your business is and why its right for them. Building your brand is one of the biggest investments you make, as a business owner, because your brand represents every decision you make for your business, from the customer service workers you hire to work in your call centre, to the design of your posters and adverts, to the price point you decide on for your products.

If those decisions don’t build a brand that speaks to the customers you want shopping with you, then your business is fatally compromised. You need a way to measure your brand health to ensure that all that investment is doing what you need it to.

Net Promoter Score

One of the most helpful measures of the strength of your brand is your Net Promoter Score or NPS. This is a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone else: it really is the bedrock of success for a business, the engine of growth, more so than any amount of advertising, however effective.

Your Net Promoter Score is relatively simple to calculate – as long as you have access to the data. You ask your customers to rank on a scale of 1-10 how likely they are to recommend your brand to someone else, divide the number of 9s and 10s by the sample size to find your Promoter Score, divide the total of 1s to 6s to find your detractor score and simply subtract one from the other.

This gives you a quick and direct look at how customers are responding to your brand, and your likelihood of grassroots growth.

Unprompted Brand Recall

This is the other vital measure of your brand’s health, and one that takes in the wider marketplace, not merely people who have already chosen to spend their money with you.

Unprompted Brand Recall is exactly what it sounds like: when asked about brands in your niche, what proportion of customers name yours. This is a great measure of the success and penetration of your marketing, and by splitting up the results by age, gender, income or other category, you can see just who your advertising is working for, and where its failing to leave a mark.

If your UBR is low, this could signal that your brand is ailing and it’s time for a marketing push, as people cannot choose to spend money with you if they don’t know who you are.