Measuring Brand-Building Efforts

Viewpoint by Mike Leiser, Senior Partner

This is an age old question that marketers face, particularly during annual planning cycles. While there is no "silver bullet" answer, there is a practical, rigorous, and comprehensive way to address this issue. The key is to link marketing activities and brand perceptions to the customer purchase cycle (awareness to consideration to purchase to loyalty to affinity) and return on investment. This can be accomplished in 5 steps:

1. Segment your customers, capturing the role of "context" in their motivations and behaviors, profiling attractiveness, and requirements to win.
2. Within that segmentation look at conversion rates and bottlenecks, and calculate the customer revenue value of addressing each bottleneck.
3. Identify the role and impact of brand in driving customer choice decisions and the attributes responsible for that impact.
4. Model the relevant brand attributes, identifying associations that add distinctiveness to your brand.
5. Articulate a more effective marketing strategy and investment allocation by mapping brand attribute drivers to the customer touchpoints that most influence those perceptions.

Make no mistake, this is not easy; but with an open mind, discipline, and courage, what seems like a "1,000 mile" gap can be closed.