KPIs for Brand Health Tracker: Reading BHT Metrics

Here's part 2/3 from Jayant - some basics in tracking your brands health

KPIs for Brand Health Tracker: Reading BHT Metrics

As a marketer tracking sales helps understand your market standing. But it doesn’t answer ‘why” your sales are the way they are. You may enjoy a large share but an undesirable brand strength or vice versa. Hence it is important to measure the health and equity of a brand in the market.

Brand health trackers are the mostly used “research tool” to track (hence the name tracker) and measure the standing of brand and its competitors in the market. It is a standard report that is generated on a consistent frequency. This frequency may vary from industry to industry (e.g. it’s important for CPG brands to measure key brand health metrics on monthly or even weekly basis).

Each such iteration is generally called a wave, so you read movements of key brand health metrics wave on wave. E.g. If we do brand health tracking twice a year, then you have two waves a year. 

Generally, in practice you wish to see movements of data for last 2 to 4 waves depending how far back in history to you wish to go.

In this short write up we will go through some of these key brand health metrics and analysis, which you should know as a brand manager –

Brand Funnels: As shown below, this funnels helps us understand how good the brand is doing at all aspects of customer decision making process. E.g. below graph shows us that our brand is performing poorly on translating consideration to trial and making sure we are the Most Often Used Brand (MOUB). Other brands are performing better at these aspects.

·       Awareness – The union of unaided and aided recall gives us ‘awareness’. Being low on this indicated that the brand needs to increase share of voice in the media/communications – more campaigns and communications to help improve the awareness of the brand

o   We ask “which brands are you aware of”, followed by an open-end text box. %age of respondents mentioning the brand gives us “unaided recall” of the brand

o   After which we can show a list of brands and ask “which ones of these brands are you aware of”, %age of respondents mentioning the brand gives us “aided recall” of the brand

·       Consideration – Within the brands that the respondent is aware of, it is the percentage of respondents who say they have considered purchasing/using the brand in the past Being low on this indicates our positioning or offering isn’t right i.e. consumers do not think of us as a valid choice to fulfill their needs

·       Trial – Within the brands that the respondent has considered, it is the percentage of respondents who say they have purchased/used the brand in the past Low on this generally indicates that our availability or price is an issue. Because what is

·       Usage – Within the brands that the respondent has tried, it is the percentage of respondents who say they are currently using the brand (in case of categories like confectionary, services like restaurant, hotels etc. we ask if they have used it in recently e.g. last 1 week/month etc.)

·       Most often used brand (MOUB or BUMO, Brand used most often) – Within the brands that the respondent is currently using, it is the percentage of respondents who say that the brand is their most often used brand.

Very important: For consideration, trial, usage and MOUB we generally ask respondents to not think beyond 3 months for CPG brands and up to a year for high involvement categories like cars, appliances, hotels, vacations etc.

Share of Heart/ Share of Mind: The Share of our brand versus other brands in the unaided awareness is sometimes termed as “share of mind”. Similarly, the share of our brand versus other brands for MOUB is often referred to as “share of heart”.

Likelihood to used again – Sometime, post the funnel questions, we ask respondent how likely are they to continue using their MOUB. This metric is asked on a 5/7 or 10-point scale. The percentage of respondent answering the top score or top 2 scores are reported as the loyalty metric.  

NPS – In the service sector (e.g. hospitality, telecom, software etc.) there is standard metric used called Net Promoter Score (NPS). Respondents are asked how likely are they to recommend a brand. This is asked for our and competitor brand on a 11-point scale (0 to 10). Percentage of respondents giving top 3 ratings are called promoters and bottom and bottom 6 ratings (0 to 5) are called detractors. Promoters % minus detractor % gives us the NPS score. There are other ways to calculate this and it is a topic that warrants a detailed discussion. So, till then we will pause here.

Brand Imagery: This is the second most important part of a brand health tracker. For each brand that the respondent is aware of OR have used in the past, we ask to rate the brands on different attributes.

Attribute List: Below are some examples of attributes that a brand can track –

This brand's products taste great	This brand Helps me be independent
This brand has packaging I like	This brand helps me to keep doing the things I love
This brand comes in Flavors I Like	This is a brand I trust
This brand is widely available	This brand’s products offer good value for money
This brand is Easy to find in the store	This brand’s products are of high quality
I enjoy watching the ads from this brand	This brand brings new and innovative products
This is a brand I love	Is a premium brand
This Is a brand I want to be seen using	Is an inspiring brand
This Is a popular brand	The brand is a leader in the market
This brand's products have a texture I like	This brand's products are different from other brands
Is on sale often	This brand is recommended by my friends and family

Some themes of attributes are –

Functional Benefits (price, value, ease of use etc,)

Brand positioning (emotional in nature e.g. trust, brand for me, scientific, cool, modern etc.)

Category Leadership

Recommendations/ Endorsements (reco by friend, reco by expert, reco by salesperson)

Packaging

Product

Products

Retail Availability

Advertising

Owned versus Opportunities: When comparing the brands across different attributes, you will notice attributes which our brand is the strongest versus competitive brands. These are ‘owned’ attributes, some attributes may be owned by competition as well. There is also a low hanging fruit – attributes which are not owned by any brand – i.e. all brands have a low rating on these attributes. These low hanging fruits and competition owned attributes are the opportunities for our brand to act on.

Ad/Message Recall: Sometimes brands wish to measure Ad recall along with brand health tracker. The most common ad recall metric is –  Rate of Recall: Percentage of respondents who mentioned they recall seeing an ad by the brand. This again can be asked as aided and unaided, just like the awareness metric. We also follow up this question by asking where do they recall seeing the ad – TV, print, POS, radio etc.

Purchase/Usage behavior: Brand health trackers also allow opportunity to ask behavioral and usage data. This is done especially for categories with growing distribution in the markets. Asking respondents where (point of purchase), when (how frequently) and how much (quantity) of product do they purchase.

Some Guidance tips:

·       Target population: This is important, because it will decide ‘who” will answer your brand health tracker questionnaire. Going beyond your target population will give us bad or useless data. e.g. the target for Horlicks would be Moms of kids aged 2 to 10 year old kids, from socio economic class A. B and C. these moms should be using or willing to use nutritional supplements for their kids.

·       Rolling data Versus Stand in Time: We measure brand health metrics either per wave, or we combine data for past waves to reduce any sample bias i.e. sudden jumps and movements (this is called rolling data e.g. past 3 waves rolled as one reading)

·       Brand Power: many research providers have their own trademark methodologies to give one single score brand equity score/measure.

·       Social Media: This is one aspect that warrants a special discussion. Generally, the social media indicators are ahead of its time than overall market, as early adopters are the first ones to talk about the brand or product online versus others. Also, social media analysis complements a tracker, it is still far away from replacing the traditional brand health tracker.