There’s no question that your organization’s brand is out there; the only question is whether it’s working for you as hard as it can. But what is “it” and how can you know it’s effective?

 

There’s a lot of talk about measuring brand equity, and its sibling, marketing ROI, and there are methodologies that yield a dollar value or rank, but beware of oversimplification for the sake of numbers’ reassuring objectivity. What your organization means to customers and constituents today, and its potential brand power in the future, must be assessed—and managed forward—along several dimensions, both tangible and intangible. 

 

Consider what a brand is. It’s more than your name and logo. It’s the sum of tangible things like those and the broader meaning of your organization and the expectations your clients and customers have. It helps people understand how you fit in the landscape of competitive and relevant alternatives. Your brand is an inherently intangible thing, and can be assessed only by proxies.

 

Business leaders feel pressure to quantify and predict everything, even attitudes and intangible assets. But the mindset that “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” can lead to some misguided conclusions. Brands are as difficult to capture in a single number as our national economy, and single number metrics are as likely to conceal many assumptions. And brand metrics often lump together many constituents with very different needs and perceptions; it’s not all about units moved and price premiums.

 

For example, a big pharmaceutical company certainly has products to sell, but purchase decisions don’t always fall to the person taking the pill. Physicians, insurance companies, and even government regulators have enormous influence over the final transaction. The patient may not even know who manufactured their medicine. Each of those constituents has a brand impression of the pharma company in question, based on detailed, complex, and not always shared information, and those impressions wield significant influence.

 

So if you can’t take a snapshot of your brand, and if it has more levers than you can operate, how do you assess its value, and make sensible decisions? First, it helps to think about your brand along four dimensions: tangible and intangible, near term and long term, the unit/product/offering level and the organizational level, and in terms of segments and your total market. This approach helps you set specific expectations and form more actionable brand management plans. It helps you see that jockeying for a better position on the retail shelf is related to—but distinct from—influencing Wall Street analysts. Or if you’re in a B-to-B market, it helps you focus your strategies among different classes of clients.

 

And how will you know you’re moving the needle? The delta in the top line is a crucial metric, but not the whole story. Certain details, like your price premium, and the leverage you have in attracting and retaining customers is certainly part of your brand equity, and there are strong methodologies for discerning those values. But consider a recursive brand assessment program that takes into account those observable, countable phenomena and other less tangible points of view. Involve all of your services’ or projects’ contributors—beyond the sales people and the accountants, to experts with other perspectives: your engineers, developers, customer service reps and others responsible for product design and delivery have highly sophisticated perceptions of your organization’s brand value and competitive strengths and weaknesses. If your offerings are broad or diversified, measure brand value across lines as appropriate, and be aware that a weak brand in one area might lead to fractured or uneven brand value at the organizational level. Taken together, that information has a twofold benefit: it provides insights for product evolution, and it tells you what perceptions to manage about your products and organization, helping to create a virtuous circle.

 

Looking outward, you can benchmark your brand’s reputation against your competition’s—including what you might not consider direct competition. (For example, a movie cinema isn’t necessarily competing against other cinemas: it’s competing with an array of entertainment options at similar price points, and even with plasma TVs and video on demand!)

 

What competitive position does your brand occupy? Does it stand for innovation or for dependability? For integrated solutions or focused expertise? For “whiter teeth” or for “tartar control”? Where’s the growth opportunity, and is your brand poised to capture a significant share? Does your brand decrease (or increase) the cost of doing business in a particular niche? For example, technology companies like HP and Microsoft are exploring the drug and medical device testing and marketing space, but, since potential customers find their brands synonymous with unrelated industries, they’re having a hard time competing with brands strongly associated with the FDA/regulatory space and life science sectors. Their otherwise extremely strong brands are either not differentiating advantages, or potentially impediments to gaining a foothold.

 

Making decisions about brand management strategy involves looking back and looking forward, counting what can be counted, and understanding the forces behind those results. Combine increasingly common and refined methods of financial brand value with a disciplined program for gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence. Coordinate—but don’t necessarily duplicate—brand management decisions at all levels of your operation, from the front most line of product or service delivery to organizational behavior and identity. And by making brand management at multiple levels a practice and not just an event, you will, over time, be able to mark change and make incremental refinements, rather than feeling like you have to start from scratch. It will also help you to remain responsive to changes—within your organization, in your competitors’ positions, and your markets’ demands.

 

Just because your brand equity can’t be represented by an integer doesn’t mean it can’t be understood and managed. Your brand should be a valuable asset and powerful tool for implementing your business strategy. By analyzing it across the key dimensions of tangibility, time scale, organizational level, and market populations, you can direct your brand’s trajectory and make informed decisions that you can expect to return results.

 

Eric Norman is a Strategist at Sametz Blackstone Associates; a Boston-based communications firm that helps evolving organizations better navigate change.