Does Your Brand Have a Cold, Wet Nose?

Many use the terms brand equity and brand health interchangeably; they shouldn’t.

Brand equity refers to the size of a brand.  A brand with high brand equity has lots of customers, big market share, and generates lots of profit.  However, there is no guarantee that the big brand will stay big or that it won’t gobble up increasing advertising and promotion to hold its share. The futures of the brand is what brand health is about.

So, let’s think about brand health.  Using a “Synectics-style excursion” metaphor approach, we can compare the concept of brand health to how you can tell if your dog is healthy.

So, following the metaphor, here are the signs that your brand is healthy.

Does your brand have a cold wet nose? Marketers need to create a brand health scoreboard that receives signals from a variety of feeds:

• Digital and social signals
• marketing effectiveness measurement of all activities
• Sales and market share reporting
• Purchase and conversion behaviors via household purchase panels, receipt scanning, and first party data analysis
• Brand trackers
• Customer experience systems
• Shopper insights research

Brand health is not about the size of the dog, we’re talking about whether or not the dog is healthy.  Brand health is critical to understand and measure because it is predictive of the future.  A big brand that is unhealthy won’t stay that big for long.