By conducting primary research into your brand health, you will also understand how consumer awareness is translating to brand use for your competition and how you can strategically increase your brand loyalty to counteract external market forces.
What is Brand Health?
Brand health is the overall strength, perception, and value of a brand in the minds of customers. It encompasses various aspects of a brand’s performance and reputation. Key brand health metrics include:
Brand Awareness – The level of recognition customers has with a brand.
Brand Loyalty – How loyal and committed customers are to a brand.
Brand Perception – The associations and beliefs that customers connect with a brand.
Customer Satisfaction – How satisfied customers are with various aspects of the brand.
Why Test and Monitor Brand Health?
Businesses that actively monitor their brand health can identify issues early on, such as negative customer sentiment or declining market share, and take measures to address them. Brand health metrics provide valuable insights into their market position, consumer perceptions and preferences, and overall performance. Companies can leverage this information to tailor their go to market strategies.
How Often to Test Brand Health?
The frequency at which companies should test their brand health with primary market research can vary depending on factors including the industry, competitive landscape, and the rate of change in consumer preferences. Companies should conduct brand health assessments on a regular basis to monitor their brands’ perceptions and make data-driven decisions.
Annually – A common practice for many businesses, annual assessments align with budgeting cycles and provide a regular check on brand performance.
Semi-annually – Conducted in companies with rapid shifts or where consumer preferences change frequently.
Quarterly – For businesses in highly competitive or fast-paced markets, a quarterly approach provides more frequent updates to allow for course correction.
Continuous/Monthly – Companies track customer sentiment, online mentions, and other metrics in real-time.
Event-Driven – Not conducted at any set interval, but rather in response to major events or changes in the business environment such as mergers, product launches, and disrupting events.
Here at The Farnsworth Group, we advise our clients in the building products and home and garden industries to conduct annual brand health research. Anything more frequent would likely be unnecessary because brand health in this sector is steadier than others, like Consumer Packaged Goods, Politics, Finance, and Tech.
Key Brand Heath Metrics
Brand health metrics are not very useful when taken in isolation. Comparisons should be made both with the same brand over time and against competitors’ brands.
Brand Awareness Metrics –
Testing brand awareness is essential for businesses to understand their visibility in the market and assess their marketing efforts’ effectiveness. There are two metrics to evaluate when researching your brand awareness: unaided and aided.
Unaided brand awareness is where respondents are asked to spontaneously name brands that they are aware of for a specific product. This top-of-mind recall provides insights into the brand’s presence among customers, especially if conducted at regular intervals and in comparison to competing brands.
In contrast, with aided brand awareness customers are provided with a list of brands and asked to select which ones they are aware of.
A deeper dive into brand awareness asks customers to choose which brands they have considered, tried, and recommend. Finally, they select the one brand that they use most often.
With this data a purchase funnel can be created displaying the stages a customer goes through when making a purchasing decision. This understanding of your customer purchase funnel is invaluable to the efforts of your product, marketing, channel, and sales team efforts and should be shared with each department and reinforced regularly.
Then, you can compare the results of any efforts to increase brand awareness, for example, to the benchmark you have from your annual brand health research to hold strategies and tactics accountable to driving the right results.
Brand Loyalty Metrics
Beyond just understanding the standard ‘awareness-consideration-purchase’ sales funnel, conversion rate analysis can be performed to determine loyalty to a brand. This aspect of the market research starts by asking customers which brands they considered before purchasing a product. This may include just one, or perhaps many different brands. A follow-up question asks which of the considered brands they actually purchased.
Do be aware: this example of output works best in a market with only a few dominating brands. It displays not only the percentage that purchased that brand, but also who considered another brand before purchasing, who considered that brand and purchased another brand, and those who purchased another brand without that brand’s consideration.
Here’s an example of that market analysis output:
As an alternative, and in a more crowded market, a simplified conversion rate demonstrates what brands were considered and of those, the percentage who purchased that brand.
Here is an example of that market analysis output:
Brand Perception Metrics
A popular method of determining how a brand is perceived is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It measures the likelihood of customers recommending a company's brand to others. NPS is typically assessed through a single question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, with ‘0’ being ‘not at all likely,’ and ‘10’ being ‘extremely likely,’ how likely are you to recommend [BRAND] to a friend or colleague?"
Based on their responses, customers are categorized into three groups:
• Promoters (score 9-10)
• Passives (score 7-8)
• Detractors (score 0-6)
Then, the NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The resulting score can range from -100 (if all respondents are Detractors) to +100 (if all are Promoters), with a higher score indicating a stronger likelihood of positive perceptions. NPS is simple, making it a quick and effective way to measure customer advocacy and the overall health of a brand.
In the example below, the 11% of detractors are subtracted from the 61% of promoters to yield an overall 50 net promotor score.
Ensuring the highest standards for sample quality are paramount in all research, and specifically brand health research because fake respondents are liable to falsely inflate the brand health scores.
Customer Satisfaction Metrics
Determining customer satisfaction involves assessing two key dimensions: importance and performance factors.
1. Importance factors are the attributes of a product that customers rate to find which they value the most and least.
2. Performance factors evaluate how well a specific brand meets these customer expectations.
Balancing these two dimensions of importance factors and performance factors is critical for delivering a satisfying customer experience overall.
By analyzing the gap between importance and performance factors and seeing how their competition rates on those same factors, building product manufacturers can prioritize improvements where they matter most.
Let’s look at an example of custom market research output for understanding customer satisfaction.
Performance scores that rate the same or higher than the corresponding importance scores (falling to the right of the X in the below graph) indicate that a brand is meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Conversely, performance scores that rate lower than the importance score (falling to the left of the X), denote the brand is falling behind expectations.
Tying It all Together With a Brand Health Wheel
The Brand Health Wheel that our researchers at The Farnsworth Group use is a visual representation of each of these metrics. It offers several benefits when assessing and managing brand performance:
1. Comprehensive Analysis - The Brand Health Wheel provides a holistic view of a brand’s health by incorporating multiple dimensions such as awareness, perception, loyalty, and performance.
2. Visual Clarity – The circular format of the wheel simplifies complex data into an easy-to-understand visual representation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the brand across different metrics, providing your company’s leadership with a comprehensive way to keep various departments aligned with the same overall goal.
3. Benchmarking – Comparing a brand’s position on the Brand Health Wheel from year to year and/or against competitors helps brands gauge how they stack up against others, identify opportunities for improvement, and assess the effectiveness of various efforts.
Here is a sample of a Brand Health Wheel. Depending on a company’s objectives, the spokes of the wheel may vary from this one, though consistent over time and with all brands tested.
Use Brand Health Research To Perform a Brand Gap Analysis
Brand gap analysis is a strategic evaluation process that measures the difference between a company’s intended brand image and the market’s actual perception of the brand. It involves identifying and addressing inconsistencies to align the brand more closely with its desired image.
1. Define Desired Brand Image – Determine the ideal brand image that the company aims to convey. This includes brand values, personality, positioning, and messaging.
2. Assess Current Brand Perception – Use market research to evaluate the existing brand perception in the market.
3. Identify Brand Gaps – Compare the desired brand image with the current brand perception and identify gaps between them.
4. Develop Actionable Strategies – Formulate strategies to bridge the gaps. These may include refining messaging, improving product quality, or enhancing customer experience, among other items.
Researching the Health of Your Building Products Brands
The elusive nature of brand health can make it difficult to know how to go about measuring it. Yet, without regular and targeted brand health research, it’s impossible to enhance product development and the marketing and sales strategy for your building products. If you’re struggling for your brand to be perceived in the desired light, brand health research from our team at The Farnsworth Group will help.
We will work with you to establish realistic benchmarks for measuring success in brand health improvement efforts and analyze your data against the current building materials landscape to give you strategic recommendations.
Written by Kimber Kreilein
Kimber has been serving clients of The Farnsworth Group as a Project Director since 2015 and finds joy digging into the nuances of various buyer personas in the home improvement space. When it comes to both market research and home improvement, Kimber is not afraid to get her hands dirty. Being a homeowner for 25 years, Kimber has completed various DIY projects and hired contractors for DIFM projects. Kimber is a wife and mom to two wonderful kids, two cats, and one crazy Australian Shepherd. Based in Indianapolis, you’re likely to find Kimber nose-deep into a good book. Oh, and Go Hoosiers!