When you’re running a small business, it may seem trivial to understand how well your brand is performing on a much larger scale. It can feel like something such as sales figures is enough information about how well your brand is performing. Yet businesses of all sizes can benefit from this brand index and the insights it can bestow. In short, a brand index is able to show you how well your brand is performing within your market. Unlike sales figures, a brand index doesn’t have to play catch up, after consumers have already made their mind up about a product and/or the brand of the product.
There can be variations of how a brand index is calculated. For example, the company Attest look at areas such as unprompted brand recall (how well a brand name is associated with a product type or class of products), purchase intent of consumers, net promoter score (gauging the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationship) etc. This last one being an area of customer satisfaction that seems to correlate with growth.
A brand index is much more reliable if it gains its information directly from consumers themselves. Anything based within the digital realm; such as social media mentions, search terms, or brand traffic can be distorted. For example, if biased samples are being surveyed or data generated by bots is used then the information formed in a brand index would be distorted.
The information provided can help show a general understanding of what customers think about your brand. On top of this though, the information can then be broken down into various demographics. Thus revealing to your company specific strengths and weaknesses, as your brand currently stands. This allows a company to make real-time changes to their brand. This has the previously mentioned bonus of being a lot quicker and revealing these problems and areas of success than sales. On top of this, the brand index can then show you whether the changes made were the correct ones or not. This stops any weaknesses from snowballing in the way they could when basing your brand’s success just on sales.
Overall, a brand index gives you information that is more in-depth and more in tune to how things are presently looking than sales figures will. The way it is calculated may vary. It is likely to be more reliable when compiled directly from consumer insights. With the added bonus that it shows when changes made after identifying these strengths and weaknesses were the correct changes to be made.
