Today’s CMOs are increasingly being asked to defend their brand investments.
They face tough questions that proven methods and tools from Corporate Branding Analytics can help to answer:
What is the optimal level of spend to drive financial performance? Where can you expect to move the needle and drive the greatest return? What is too little spending? Where is the return negative?
When can you expect to show financial returns on communications investments?
How efficient is your current spend in achieving brand performance targets? Are you spending more or less than competitors to achieve brand performance targets?
To make a strong business case, you need to be able to answer these questions in a clear and actionable way. That takes the right data to tie your actions to financial value. This will give you access to resources necessary to invest in your brand at the right level.
This goes beyond brand valuation. You require a deeper, multi-dimensional view of brand strength, and the power of your media spending in driving business outcomes.
That’s what Corporate Branding Analytics offers, through a suite of powerful tools that enables you to measure and optimize your brand. Since 1990, we’ve set the standard for reliable, historical data and insights that help you predict future outcomes with confidence.
The stakes have never been higher in choosing the right level of resources to allocate to brand investments. A solid Brand Equity Valuation case is essential to gaining leadership buy-in. It’s our mission to help you get it right. And that’s what Brand Science over subjectivity delivers.
We believe in transparency. Our Brand Science approach is rooted in objective, quantitative market research – BrandPower – correlated to financial performance. As a result, our valuations help you understand more than just your brand ranking based on a dollar value.
Time-tested over two decades of market research, our Brand Equity Valuation approach sets the standard, using reliable, stable data that your leadership team can trust.
How our Brand Equity Valuation works
Companies want greater transparency and a clear line of sight into what’s driving the value of their brand equity. Most valuation vendors utilize black-box methods.
Our Brand Equity Valuation approach is the only methodology audited and verified by the Marketing Accounting Standards Board. Experts rate it the most reliable and accurate valuation method available.
Our tools measure your brand’s value as both a specific dollar amount and as a percentage of market capitalization. The quarterly results provide a benchmark comparison between your brand and competitors that you define.
Brand Equity Values in dollars vs. as a percentage of market cap
Our Brand Equity Valuation benchmarking tools make it easy to understand your brand value relative to peers. When a brand’s contribution is lower than the industry average, our analysis can identify growth opportunities and predict return on brand investment. These examples show that Apple’s brand generates the largest dollar value. Benchmarked against tech giants, Apple also demonstrates solid performance for brand value as a percentage of market capitalization.
Brand Equity Valuation decision support
Our data helps you put your brand’s contribution to financial performance in context at any point in time to understand:
Is your brand driving greater financial value than competitors’ and Corporate Branding Analytics sector benchmarks? How much more (or less) over time? Are you improving quarter after quarter?
Is brand driving momentum for financial performance, presenting an ideal window to increase brand investments? How much value can be created?
Is decay in brand value dragging down financial results? If financials are improving, is your brand getting credit?
Our Brand Equity Valuation methodology
This independent measurement of brand health provides a truly objective assessment of brand value. Our methodology is completely transparent and involves no “black-box” set of judgments. Instead, we leverage reliable, stable market research, BrandPower data. With 25 years of proven research data, we can ensure consistent input to our model. This statistical model identifies the contribution of the brand and evaluates it in the context of financial data to determine brand dollar value.
Brand Equity Valuation is expressed two ways:
The percent that the brand contributes to market cap tells how much value can be directly attributed to the brand. It measures the overall impact of your efforts. In turn, senior leadership can build a business case and evaluate the return-on-brand investments, in a way that is easily understood.
The dollar value of the brand is the brand’s value to the company as an intangible asset. This number can change day-to-day as the company’s overall enterprise value fluctuates. It is used to help senior leadership understand the brand’s asset value and is also a measure of the value that the market places on the brand.
Using BrandPower market research data, our Corporate Branding Index by Sector offers on-demand benchmarking and actionable insights.
The index delivers instant insight into your brand’s performance relative to your sector average, as well as competitors’. You can track which brands are gaining momentum or losing ground with a single, easy-to-understand index.
For ongoing monitoring and competitive analysis, you can also choose to build your own Corporate Branding Index with a custom benchmarking list. This includes direct competitors, partners and companies targeting your specific audience.
The Corporate Branding Index methodology
The Corporate Branding Index calculates the average for a sector or a custom benchmarking list. The performance of each company is displayed relative to the industry average.
The BrandPower ranking shows how you compare to the most powerful brands, and against leaders in your sector. Through a single measure of brand health that includes familiarity and favorability metrics, you have the ability to monitor your brand and how investments affect its performance over time.
Based on BrandPower data, our Corporate Branding Index® by Sector allows you to track which brands are gaining or losing momentum, and so much more. You can also perform custom benchmarking against direct competitors, partners and “mindshare” companies vying for your audience’s attention. This gives you the most relevant insight on your brand performance.
How BrandPower works
To keep your finger on the pulse of your brand health and performance, our analysis measures two key metrics: familiarity and favorability. We collect responses from “opinion elites” – more than 10,000 highly influential stakeholders – on an ongoing basis. This market research data creates an objective, quantified view of your brand health in a single aggregate measure: BrandPower.
The BrandPower 1000 Database includes 25 years of market research, which is constantly updated. This creates the most reliable set of benchmarking data available to predict your future brand performance.
BrandPower Metrics: benchmarking on familiarity and favorability
BrandPower pinpoints your advantages and weaknesses relative to competitors. The example chart above shows that Coca-Cola is in a good position – strong across both BrandPower dimensions. Amex is well known but should work to improve favorability, while Pepsico can benefit from increasing familiarity.
How BrandPower supports decisions
BrandPower research delivers on-demand market intelligence and actionable insights for your industry. To tap unexploited opportunities, it tracks changes in your brand’s favorability and familiarity versus peers, and helps you decide:
When does your brand have momentum and opportunity for growth? When is the brand at risk?
Which competitors’ brands are in decay, presenting perfect targets for a challenge?
What brands in your sector are gaining or losing momentum?
How are disruptive forces affecting industry leaders in your sector?
What separates brand leaders from followers in your sector?
Are you demonstrating brand leadership? Is your brand able to increase familiarity and favorability at the same time? Are you confronted with the “Familiarity Dilemma,” – an increase in familiarity that costs you favorability, common among industry followers?
BrandPower methodology: audience and brand health metrics
Our opinion elite audience is composed of business decision makers and well-educated, affluent consumers who make brand-based decisions every day as part of their business and personal lives. Our brand health metrics include:
Familiarity – we ask survey respondents how familiar they are with a brand. Their answers reflect their awareness beyond just the company name.
Favorability – we ask those whose familiarity with brands goes beyond name recognition to rate brands based on three factors: overall reputation, perception of management and investment potential.
Corporate Branding can also conduct proprietary BrandPower research among custom audiences defined by the client. Our team carries out global research, measuring your most relevant audiences, metrics, attributes and customer experience. As a result, you can determine what drives value and impacts your brand’s health.
Effective brand development begins with a deeper understanding of how your brand is perceived and how it performs. Knowing how perceptions align with your company’s goals, culture and communications, along with drivers of customer choice, is critical to building your optimal brand strategy.
Wise brand management requires ongoing measurement and tracking of progress. Along with our internal research department and Corporate Branding Analytics, we are a pioneer in corporate brand research, assessment and valuation. Our recommendations spring from a deep-rooted belief that a brand is an organizational asset that can be measured and managed. Knowing both the macro and micro drivers of customer behavior creates clarity to help you measure just how much your brand contributes to the bottom, and top line. We use data from our Corporate Branding Index® with its 25 years of brand image and financial performance data on 1,000 companies to gain rapid insights into your brand and industry. And we can also field custom research to build the right program to meet your objectives. Research and analytics solutions we provide include:
Fact-based decision making through qualitative and quantitative research
Generating insights for innovation through customer ethnographies
Customer experience and omnichannel analysis
Uncovering key attributes that help drive purchase
Identifying positioning opportunities to lead to competitive advantage
Measuring the impact value of your customer journey
How The Hartford puts the customer at the center of a centuries-old company
For insurance companies, the struggle to bring a human element into their business and culture is nothing new. The Hartford faced this dilemma as the company grew exponentially and ultimately became hampered by its inside-out corporate style.
Using a customer-centered brand strategy crafted in partnership with Tenet Partners, the company set the stage for a dramatic shift. Starting with financial communications and sponsorship of the NCAA, a fresh approach was developed to bring customers, and their personal stories, to the fore.
Creating a people-to-people experience
As the new brand personality was embraced by the organization, a larger effort to redesign the website and intranet began. The first step was to rethink the information architecture with a more human-centered design and emphasis on ease-of-use.
Based on user input, the site was divided into two categories: one for business customers and the other for individuals and families. These two areas were then better able to focus on the specific needs of two very different targets. The combination of visual elements and interface design significantly improved the site’s usability. It also had a positive result of increasing customer satisfaction and drawing more traffic.
Celebrating a rich history
In 2010, The Hartford refreshed its corporate brand positioning and identity to better reflect its move to become more customer friendly. The program helped launch the celebration of the firm’s 200-year anniversary.
Very few brands can boast such a rich history. In business since 1810, The Hartford was there for the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake, bonded construction of the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, and stood by customers through the Civil War, the Great Depression and two World Wars.
Our research revealed that The Hartford’s customers, brokers and agents considered the 200-year milestone a meaningful achievement that deserved recognition.
With customer brand research as the foundation, Tenet looked closely at the evolution of The Hartford Stag, the symbol of the company’s brand as far back as 1861.
Without diminishing the current promise of strength and stability, Tenet’s design team created a commemorative bicentennial logo that evokes The Hartford’s promise of empathy, expertise and enduring values. The bicentennial message – Trusted 200 Years – speaks to the company’s enduring relationship with customers.
To accompany the new logo, Tenet developed a dynamic visual system. The Hartford’s new visual identity creates a more meaningful experience for future generations of customers.
The design system – and its unique templates and toolkits – gave business units the flexibility they were looking for to tailor their communications to their distinct audiences without sacrificing corporate unity.
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