Diagnose and monitor your brand’s Meaningful Difference

In our previous blog posts, we introduced The Blueprint for Growth – our proprietary framework designed to provide CMOs with clear pathways for driving brand growth. Let’s recap: the Blueprint for Brand Growth demonstrates that brands grow by becoming Meaningfully Different to more people. Brands that achieve this command 5x the market penetration today and have a substantial advantage in increasing their penetration over the next two years.

The Power of Meaningful Difference

Creating a Meaningful Difference is like building a moat around your brand – one that is difficult for competitors to replicate. However, maintaining this advantage requires constant vigilance. You must keep a close watch on what’s happening both within your category and with your brand. The key is to maintain a consistent relative edge over others in your category by continuously identifying, measuring, and optimising your brand’s sources and degree of differentiation.

How to Diagnose and Monitor Your Brand’s Meaningful Difference

So, how can you effectively diagnose and monitor your brand’s Meaningful Difference and its behavioural outcomes? Here’s how:

Diagnose

To leverage the Blueprint for Brand Growth, start with a thorough analysis of your category and your brand. This will help you identify critical questions that can drive growth:

• How Meaningful and Different is your brand compared to competitors? What strategies can you employ to make your brand stand out?
• Is your brand’s salience limiting its market reach? Are there barriers preventing people from choosing your brand, or does your brand lack strong predisposition among potential buyers?
• Do consumers prefer your brand to the extent they are willing to pay a premium? Understanding this will help you assess your pricing strategy.
• Is your brand maximising its sales potential? Are you effectively converting predisposed customers and capturing sales from competitors during decision-making moments?

Our BrandEvaluator diagnostic solution provides a comprehensive assessment of your brand’s current positioning. It pinpoints areas where you need to focus, enabling you to build a more Meaningfully Different and Salient brand that resonates with more people.

Monitor

Once you have diagnosed your brand’s Meaningful Difference, the next step is to monitor the impact of your growth efforts. Understanding the value your marketing activities bring to consumers and your business is essential for fostering and leveraging a strong brand.

Regularly tracking your brand’s Meaningful Difference in comparison to competitors and other market activities allows you to maintain a consistent edge over others in your category.

At Kantar, we advocate tracking a blended brand KPI scorecard. The most effective measurement strategy combines short-term and long-term signals that reflect how consumers respond to your brand and marketing initiatives. This encompasses both sales and brand growth.

Short-term Signals

There are several short-term signals that serve as immediate outcomes of your brand and marketing activities:

• Digital Campaign and Website KPIs: Analyse metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and site traffic to gauge immediate engagement
• Social and Search Diagnostics: Evaluate volume and sentiment to understand consumer conversations and perceptions
• Total Communications Awareness: Measure the reach and frequency of your brand messages across various platforms
• Advertising Diagnostics: Assess branding, comprehension, and motivation to determine the effectiveness of your advertising efforts

Digital search volumes are particularly valuable as short-term response indicators. They provide insights into market anticipation. Branded search measures unprompted consumer interest, while share of search indicates mental availability (salience) and active consideration. Kantar’s BrandDigital monthly digital search tracker offers a comprehensive view of these dynamics.

Long-term Signals

Slower-moving metrics are key indicators of how well your brand and marketing efforts contribute to long-term brand value growth. These include:

• Traditional Brand Fundamentals: Brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, recommendation, and claimed usage are foundational metrics for long-term brand health
• Brand Equity Measurement: This reflects the overall predisposition towards your brand, a positive bias that consumers have towards your brand that gives it a head start

For the latter, in our Blueprint for Brand Growth, we employ metrics that measure Meaningful, Different, and Salient attributes. These metrics can be combined to predict sales, future growth, pricing potential, and activation potential. We refer to these as Power Metrics:

• Demand Power
• Pricing Power
• Future Power
• Activation Power
• Experience Power

We advocate for these Power Metrics as long-term indicators of brand growth. Each has been extensively validated to drive sales, command a price premium, and create future demand.

These four headline metrics complement a broad range of indicators and behavioural measures. Together, they help marketers answer the all-important question: Is my marketing effective? The Power Metrics confirm that you are injecting value back into the brand, sustaining and potentially increasing your pricing power, and securing a future growth. All that remains is to consistently track your brand against these metrics.

Partner with Us for Accelerated Brand Growth

Work with Kantar to create a brand tracking system that accelerates your brand growth. Our approach combines validated metrics and cutting-edge analytics to help you shape your brand future.