Whether you’re building an entirely new brand or rebranding your organisation around different values and goals, defining what brand success actually looks like is important for tracking the intended outcomes and benefits of the process.
After all, building brands for purely superficial or abstract reasons isn’t beneficial or practical. We should build them to help us achieve better organisational alignment, a sense of identity (both internally and externally), and improve engagement among employees.
While a good brand does involve crafting a consistent and appealing “face” you can leverage in marketing and communications, many companies get too distracted by this aspect alone when consulting a brand identity service. For full brand success, it’s crucial that you define the scope of what your brand means to you and what you want it to help you achieve.
Key Aspects of Organisational Brand Success
A few basic things you should be striving for when building a brand are:
• Your employees – right through from your front desk to your senior management team – are aligned with the same values and goals that define what your business stands for.
• People have a clear understanding of how they should behave in accordance with your key brand principles and values.
• Customers, clients, advocates, investors and any external audiences are presented with a clear, recognisable and engaging brand identity.
Criteria for Measuring Brand Success
We often take brand success to mean the number of people who have encountered and recognise a company’s visual branding and core services. However, brands are so much more than the “impressions” that marketing campaigns receive. Below are some key ways to measure the success of your brand
• Employee engagement –
Are all employees aware of and invested in the key tenets of your brand, its principles and what it stands for? How far do their personal views and opinions align with the goals of the company, and to what extent are they committed to achieving the goals of the brand?
• Customer loyalty –
A good measure of your brand’s success is when existing customers purchase your products and services instead of leaving you for competitors. To an extent, this can be thanks to the integrity of your brand, especially in cases where your product doesn’t beat competitors on price or other differentiating factors.
• Decision making –
Can high-level company decisions be made that instinctively align with the vision and goals set out in your brand mission? How many times were key decisions made that didn’t align with your company values?
• Stakeholder confidence –
Do partners, investors, or other invested parties buy into your brand vision?
• Brand Points –
How often can success be traced back to the quality and consistency of your brand. Have you received specific mentions in the press or industry awards?
Importantly, brand success is not the same as commercial success. While an organisation might perform well in regard to key performance indicators, this does not necessarily suggest that the company’s brand has played a key role in this. Other elements like service quality, price competitiveness or market factors might have been the main driver of success.
Success Is a Team Event
When your company has achieved a strong brand identity, success should be a team event, shared by all. If your employees are aligned behind shared goals and principles, they should feel satisfied with the outcomes they have helped to achieve.
Some companies will actively discuss the way their brands have evolved or matured during the course of a year. For instance, they may explore how key decisions were or weren’t aligned with the company’s core values, and whether future decisions should be adjusted for better integration.
Building a Brand Identity?
Regardless of the size of your company or brand, a well thought out brand strategy can only help guide and support the way your business operates.
While it can be harder to assign set criteria for brand success and indicators that show you the health of your brand at any given time, it’s important to consider this idea of brand success so you can strive to foster greater integrity, alignment and engagement with your brand, throughout your organisation.
At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, our brand identity service is carried out with this idea of brand success baked into the process so that organisations understand how they can maintain and measure the effectiveness of their brands, long after they’ve been established.