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What is it?

Brand analytics seeks to determine the strength of your brand compared to your competitors. Your brand is more than just your logo and your commercial livery; it’s the look and feel of your products and what they represent to your customers.

Contrary to popular opinion your brand is not what you think it is; it’s what your customer thinks it is and, more importantly, what Google and other search engines think it is. Knowing what that is, is clearly important and will impact your decision making and strategic direction.

The purpose of brand analytics is to:

• Find out your current market position and what your brand stands for according to your customers and other external sources.
  
• Investigate your current and future internal brand according to your management and employees.
  
• If a gap exists between the two – take action to close that gap.
  

Why does it matter?

Brand analytics matters because brands matter, and what your customers think and feel about your business and brand matters because it will often influence whether they buy your product or not.

Brand fashions may come and go and if your product or service is the current ‘must have’ product then ride the wave, but even if it’s not you need to understand what you are selling above and beyond the product or service. Is your brand young, innovative and creative? Is it secure and strong? Does it spell trust? Knowing these things can make a huge difference to performance and how you position and market your offerings.

When do I use it?

Brand analytics is something that needs to be monitored. Thankfully this is much easier than it used to be because of social media. Many companies are not monitoring what is being said about them and therefore what their customers think of their brand via social media posts on Facebook and Twitter.

For example, the sports drink company Gatorade has had a social media command centre in Chicago since 2010. ‘Mission Control’ is a marketing ‘war room’ housed inside the marketing department and it monitors the brand in real time. Gatorade measures blog conversations across a variety of topics and shows how hot those conversations are across the blogosphere. The company also runs detailed analysis around key topics and product and campaign launches. It also tracks terms relating to its brand, including competitors, as well as its athletes and sports nutrition-related topics. Basically, Gatorade knows what people are saying about the company and its products all over the world.

What business questions is it helping me to answer?

Brand analytics can help you answer business questions such as:

• What do our customers think of our brand?
  
• Is that impression changing over time?
  
• What are they saying about competitors compared to us?
  

How do I use it?

Brand analytics is about understanding how your brand is perceived. In order to do that you can source data anywhere your customers and potential customers are discussing your brand. This could include customer service conversations, sales conversations, online forums, blogs, review sites, and social media. You can also install Google Alerts, which will alert you every time someone mentions your brand online.

Once you have the base information via text or voice data you can then apply sentiment analysis (Chapter 9) to keep an eye on whether the overall mood is positive or negative towards your brand.

Practical example

As the owner of a local chain of gyms and fitness centres you are keen to understand how your brand is perceived. This is not the first time you analysed your brand. A few years after starting the business you employed a brand consultant who did the research for you. This included focus groups (Chapter 21) as well as various surveys (Chapter 19 and 20) and in-depth interviews (Chapter 22). This was, however, quite time-consuming and expensive.

This time you want to use some of the new data sets that already exist and conduct the analysis yourself. You start by putting your brand into various search engines and seeing what comes up about your brand. Following links and visiting review sites can allow you to see what others are saying about your business and brand. All the text data you discover will then allow you to run sentiment analysis (Chapter 9) so you can gauge how people feel about your brand, and also text analysis (Chapter 8) to see what they are saying about your brand. There is now so much data online and people are so comfortable (for better or worse) sharing their experiences online that you can easily access data that will help assess your brand. Plus, this data is already out there – it’s recent and usually more honest and accurate than many of the traditional approaches.

Tips and traps

The internet is a rich source of information regarding how people feel about your brand and your business. People love to share, they especially love to share when someone has upset them, or they are upset about a product or service. You need to tap into this rich vein of information so you can monitor the health of your brand and use the feedback as an opportunity to improve and quickly convert unhappy customers into raving fans.

Ironically, if you solve a customer’s problem quickly you have an opportunity to not only turn that situation around but win them over completely.

You can, however, get lost down a rabbit warren of data if you are not careful. This process is not simply seeking to find out what everyone has ever said about your brand, it’s about gauging the sentiment and how people perceive your brand so you can take action where necessary to improve that perception and add brand value.

Further reading and references

To find out more about brand analytics see for example:

• Sorger, S. (2013) Marketing Analytics: Strategic Models and Metrics, 1st edition, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
  
• http://www.tcba.co.uk/