Happily Misunderstood

What to measure?

‘Accountability’ and ‘effectiveness’ were some of the industries more liberally used phrases of last year, but what should we be measuring and how? Asking this question means asking a more fundamental one, how do communications work to build brands, and how does this payback in cold hard cash? Economic measures may tell us if a brand is performing, but not why, and this is what we need to know if we want to replicate success.

Traditional metrics used to assess brand health have their roots in traditional views of how brands are built. These traditional views tend to be variations of persuasion models that rely on moving the consumer through a series of logical stages, e.g. AIDA. It’s interesting that definitions of what a brand is allow for non-rational elements, whilst traditional brand models seem to focus purely on rational measures. The problem is that we are not rational creatures (all the rage at the moment, see ‘Nudge‘, ‘Predictably Irrational’ and ‘Freakonomics’). I believe that the ‘irrational’ contribution of brands is exactly what we work so hard to create, and hence should be measured. We can achieve this by measuring differences in subjective brand impressions and objective measures. The irrational contribution of a brand is dependent on associated feelings and experiences, none of which are constant.

Measuring differences in brand affect

I think that affect can be measured by breaking it down to components that can be each measured in terms of differences between the consumer’s subjective feelings and objective reality. ‘Value’ and ‘desirability’ have both been highlighted as predictive measures of brand success, I believe that taken together, they are correlates of brand affect.

In brand context, risk is equated to value, it is the relative financial risk of choice compared to other options. Measuring perceived relative price is nothing new, but by comparing this to actual relative price will give an indication of the consumer’s subjective opinion of financial risk vs. an objective measure. A subjectively ‘smaller than life’ assessment of risk would provide a key factor of brand affect.

In a brand context, desirability can be equated to popularity. Measuring consumer perceptions of popularity/fame, and comparing these to actual measurements, will provide an indication of brand desirability. This might be achieved by asking consumers ‘how many people out of 10 do you think use this brand’ to establish a consumer perception of popularity, this can be compared to actual popularity (penetration used as proxy). Desirability, a subjectively ‘larger than life’ assessment of popularity, would provide the second key factor of brand affect.

Perceived brand value (risk) compared to perceived desirability (popularity) would provide indirect, and measurable correlates for brand affect.

Measuring differences in brand experience

Altering brand experience is a hallmark of successful brands. Take the Pepsi/Coke challenge, the Coke brand is so strong it actually fools your taste buds into believing they prefer Coke to Pepsi, whilst the opposite is true in blind taste tests.

Comparing consumer’s subjective impressions of a brand with objective measures will provide an indirect measurement of the extent to which marketing efforts have changed the consumer’s experience of the brand. Some examples of this approach might include:

• Sensory experience enhancements, as measured by blind vs. branded sensory evaluation (taste/touch/smell)
• Social experience enhancements as measured by with vs. observed measures of confidence such as body language and discourse analysis

Finally…

What we choose to measure depends on how we think brands work. If you believe that bands operate via persuasion, then there are a whole host of existing rationally biased metrics that can be used to assess brand strength. However, if you believe as I do, that brand experience and affect play a larger role in consumer decision making than cognitive factors, we will have to embrace new ‘irrational’ measures of brand strength.

This is part of a wider essay written for the IPA Diploma course, it can be found in full here.