QuantifiedNation #4: Brands measuring brand measurement

Food for thought

In the last edition of Quantified Nation, we discussed the importance of KPIs with a focus on digital metrics and conversions. Today, we will share some ideas about brand measurement.

Marketing Measurement is a somewhat vague concept. Measuring advertising effectiveness, campaign reach, brand health, loyalty program uplift in sales, product engagement, and customer experience requires different metrics, data sources, analysis, and skills to make the most of it. Yet, most companies today tend to focus on one or a few aspects, leaving others with a sense of abandonment from leadership.

Well, it is known that analytics only influence 54% of marketing decisions according to Gartner in 2020, and the main reason for that is (surprise, surprise!) because data findings conflict with the intended course of action.

Let’s try to do better; we need to become KPI experts to focus on the right things and we cannot leave our brand aside.

We agree it's important to stick to a few KPIs, but if you are not moving some part of your budget based on brand KPIs, most likely you will have too much of your investment in lower-funnel media. You are eroding further growth, and most of your results beyond collecting existing demand depend on external factors.

“Our goal is to sell” some might say. “We are focused on loyalty” others might argue.

Yet, in any customer journey, there are so many forces that can lead the user to buy from us or from the competitor that some tend to deny the importance of building a brand, not to mention the importance of setting brand KPIs.

Below, you will find some of the latest developments in brand measurement. For now, we will say brand metrics require direct alignment with business objectives, not just tying them to another marketing objective. Use a balance of short-term and long-term brand metrics and ensure a combination of incrementality with proper competitive benchmarking.

What we cannot deny is the importance of the brand as a concept when we want to understand consumer behavior and how it changes due to marketing activities. You cannot leave the brand aside, even in many purchase decisions where there is high commoditization or the presence of cheaper and perfect substitute products.

For every brand out there, there must be a brand measurement strategy in place. Otherwise, your revenue will suffer from abandonment. You can do better!

Latest developments on brand measurement

Brand tracking and brand equity measurement methodologies have been always evolving. A classical model that several research agencies adapted to different commercial brand equity tools was Keller’s, this is a great starting point.

Then around the 2000s it came Jan Hofmeyr who worked in model improvements both in Ipsos and Kantar/TNS. Inspired on his works, we saw Ipsos “Brand Value Creator” and Kantar “Power of Mind”¹.

Those models incorporated synthetic KPI using a smaller set of questions, with mathematical treatment using Power Laws. They also predicted market share using a mix of equity-related and market-related measures, similar to Byron Sharp’s mental and physical availability.

So, what happened recently? A couple of interesting developments.

First, Ehrenberg Bass’ Jenny Romaniuk has launched a book “Better Brand Health” with their views on how all the ideas from How Brands Grow should be applied for a brand tracking survey. Absolutely recommended reading if you are interested in the topic. It touches elements such as category lense, category entry points, jobs to be done… All in line with their school of thought. It elaborates on new metrics such as mental penetration or mental network size. One could object that there’s an overuse of straw man arguments, painting a situation of marketing malpractices that is not that extreme.

Second, Ipsos has recently updated their new brand tracking product, called “Contextual Brand Tracking” (press release). The biggest change is that all the attribute questions are answered “in context”. That is, there’s a list of “jobs to be done” or “category entry points” where they ask the consumer if they have been in that situation recently. This context lense is truly important, as the competitive set really changes depending on the scenario. In the case of Ipsos the context is a true past recent experence from the consumer. In Romaniuk’s proposal, it’s more of an hypothetical category-entry-point.

As a bonus and related to this topic, Pilar McCrory Huertas and I (Pablo) published an article in the ESOMAR magazine (Part 1, Part 2) where we explored the evolution of the different schools of brand building up to what we coined as the "syncretic" school and the associated changes in brand measurement models.

Quantified Nation brings you Marketing Measurement Magic through the fingertips of Jesús Martín and Pablo Pérez. Subscribe so you do not miss future editions and help us spread the word for a better Marketing Measurement world

Hot Takes

Top Quality Creative Quadruples your Profit (link) from WARC. Meta-analyis combining Kantar Link database (on creative quality) and WARC’s database of ROI. These benchmarks are always useful, a great starting point for many situations.

Industry updates and events

Ehrenberg Bass institute is touring the world with their “How Brands Grow for Executives”. There will be physical sessions in Singapore, Europe and USA. Price tag for a workshop is nothing to laugh about, but the content is surely top quality. Link to tegistration and more info.

ESOMAR will host a 3-day event on Insights in Bogotá in April 7-9th, including a dedicated session on media metrics on the last day. Link with details of agenda and logistics.

Chart of the day

Air fryers still hot on Google trends. Will it ever wear out? The populatiry of this kitchenware started earlier in the USA and it shows some signs of having reached the roof. However, popularity is still going high in countries like UK or Spain, and places like Germany seem to have just started discovering it!

Dear reader, what’s your situation

Learning corner

Did you know third party cookies are going away in Chrome this year 2024? Still, the idea of attaching impressions and link them to conversions through third party cookies is used by some brand departments to justify investment without much success.

Learn one of the solutions that will help advertising technologies to tie impressions to conversions in an aggregate, privacy preserving way. Find more about the Attribution Reporting API that is being tested in Chrome.

Oldies but goldies

2018 Thinbox “Profit Ability: the business case for advertising” (link). This work touches many of the important elements to have a sophisticated effectiveness convesation (long term, scalability…). Many of the learning are timeless, except for those comparting media channel percormance, as the landscape (costs, format, audience…) has changed.

1. Kantar was also selling their MDS model based on other concepts, which is their most popular offering today and constitutes the backbone of their BrandZ database.