It is tempting to compare your brand to others when choosing which metrics to track – but comparison often leads to you measuring the wrong things and stalling growth.
Shakespeare once wrote, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” However, if Shakespeare had grown up in my hometown of Whyalla, South Australia, that second line might have been, “Thou art more scorching, and more blistering.” Not quite as complimentary…
As normal as Shakespeare’s inclination to wax poetic is so is our desire to compare our own brands’ performance with, well, just about anything really. Competitors are often an easy place to turn to in order to satisfy that urge. Examples of competitor-based metrics strategy include:
The Cheerleader: where you try to emulate the biggest brand in the category, aka the ‘They got that score, we can too!‘ approach. Note: this is best employed while alternating star jumps and claps.
The Hercule Poirot: where you draw on your detective skills to work out why brands grew and echo any rising metrics for other growing brands, aka the ‘Aha, growth indicator detected, so let’s copy that!‘ approach.
The Chameleon: where you co-opt scores achieved by an aspirational brand from another category and aspire to look like them, aka the ‘We want to be the Patagonia of yogurts!‘ approach.
The (everything tastes like) Chicken: where you draw averages or top quartile benchmarks from a large database of brands without any consideration to whether other brands have been employing best practice aka the ‘Let’s aim for mediocrity and celebrate doing a bit better than it!‘ approach.
The Optimist: where you select a positive quality and try to score the highest on this, aka the ‘What the world needs now, is <insert favourite emotion>, sweet <insert favourite emotion>’, approach. Note: This one is best sung.
However, focusing on other brands can be risky. Professor Scott Armstrong of The Wharton School, showed that managers who focused on beating rivals rather than their own profitability caused long term issues for the company.
Focusing on other brands, even successful ones, can mislead when you don’t know the details on how they got there. You can misinterpret the cause of success, and fixate on the wrong metric, leading to poor decisions. Even with the right metrics, goal setting can be compromised. A smaller brand might set unrealistic expectations, while a bigger brand sets the soft goals that breeds complacency.
Yes, your marketing mix model might give you numbers to work with, but it needs to have the right data to do so.
An alternative is to set goals that improve marketing practice as well as performance. Here are some metrics with objectives from sources other than competitors/other brands.
Metric: Fame % of a distinctive asset
Objective: Prompted awareness % of the brand name
The metric explained
Fame is the proportion of category buyers/users that, when exposed to that asset, evoke your brand. The higher the Fame score for an asset, the lower the branding risk when used.
Why this objective
Irrespective of what your distinctive asset scores now, the aim should be to get it to 100%. Every percentage point below 100% Fame leaks effectiveness. Remember your alternative to using this asset is the brand name, which has maximum Fame. Even a new or small brand with less than 100% prompted awareness should set a goal of 100% Fame so everyone who sees the asset evokes the brand. If potential buyers don’t even recognise your brand, then that is a separate problem to solve.
For assets with less than 100% Fame you need an asset-building plan in place. Otherwise, you will just keep using an under-performing asset, which will hamper achieving other metrics such as the next one, correct branding.
Metric: Correct branding in marketing communications
Objective: 100% correct branding
The metric explained
Correct branding is the ability of someone who has been exposed to a piece of marketing communications to remember the brand(s) being advertised. It’s a memory retrieval question, where the cue is the piece of communication (unbranded) and the brand is the item retrieved. Alternative approaches are insufficient to identify if the goal of correct branding has been achieved. For example, asking viewers to rate branding quality on a scale focuses on evaluation in the moment, not evocation in the future.
Why this objective
The objective for this should be 100% because the gap between the reach you pay for and the branded reach you get is a waste of the media budget. When you have less than 100% this means either the branding is poorly executed or the creative is distracting: neither of which is conducive for advertising effectiveness. Correct brand linkage is also essential for building mental availability, which leads us to the third set of metrics.
Metrics: Mental availability
Objective: As expected for a brand of your size/the brand size you want to be given market share or brand penetration/NBD-Dirichlet benchmarks
The metrics explained
Three key mental availability metrics, as outlined in Better Brand Health, are:
Mental Market Share (MMS) is the share of responses your brand gets versus competitors, it captures your brand’s overall mental availability competitiveness.
Mental Penetration (Mpen) is the proportion of category buyers/users that link the brand to one Category Entry Point (CEP), which captures how many people have the chance of thinking of the brand in buying situations.
Network Size (NS) is the number of CEPs linked to the brand, which captures how widespread are the memory paths to retrieve the brand.
Why these objectives
The expected scores for mental availability metrics come from the size of the brand’s buyer base. The more buyers a brand has, the higher its mental availability metrics should be. The reason is simple, a brand’s buyers are more likely to link their brand with an attribute than non-buyers. Therefore bigger brands, with more buyers, get more responses than smaller brands, with fewer buyers.
Think of your mental availability metrics data like blood pressure statistics – you don’t celebrate having have the highest or lowest blood pressure. Similarly without brand size (market share, penetration) to calibrate your expectations, you risk misinterpreting the results and the actions to take. If you get higher or lower than you should for your size, then like blood pressure, this usually suggests a problem to fix.
The NBD-Dirichlet model can provide brand level benchmarks. Here is an example of mental availability metrics from a survey of GenAI users, using the 15 most commonly encountered CEPs for the generative AI category, and the NBD-Dirichlet model to generate metric estimates for each brand.
Read the full article in Marketing Week.