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5 questions to determine brand health and test your strategy

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 27 June, 2016

When you want to determine brand health there are several ways to go about it. Here, we’ll go through a list of important questions you need to ask to get closer to creating a strong brand. These questions will help you form an idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are for your brand and where you can improve.

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Whatever stage your brand is at—whether you’re setting up a new enterprise, creating your business plan, measuring your brand health or sense-checking your position—this is a good place to start.

 

1. Do you have a clear understanding about what you’re trying to achieve? Does your team?

This is where it's important you’ve taken the time and effort to develop and clearly communicate your brand vision and what your mission is. Crucially, you will have created a document that summarises your vision and shared it with your team so they can communicate it to others in the business and beyond it.

 

2. What does your brand stand for?

Determine what your actual values are. This goes beyond your brand vision and mission. Are you honest, thorough, natural, cheap and cheerful, family-oriented, fashionable, or serious? Does your brand resonate with freedom, wealth, adventure or safety?

Create a shortlist of about ten brand values and then cull out five. At the end of the exercise you should have three to five core values that communicates your brand in a nutshell. These values must be ones that your employees can understand and stand behind—and ones that your consumers feel affinity to.

This brings us to the next point: does your brand's values resonate with what consumers value in your market?

 

Related content: Tracking your brand health

 

3. What’s important to the consumer?

To become a successful business, it is critical to know and truly understand your customer base. Look not just at your customer demographics, but also at their psychographics as well as their wants and needs. You will need to have gathered the relevant and appropriate information through a customer feedback tool, such as Customer Monitor, and analyse this thoroughly.

For example, if one of your core brand values is that your product is “natural”, how important is that to your consumers? Is there a core competitor that dominates in that space? In that case, are you willing to compete with that? Which leads to our next point.

 

Related content: 4 brand health metrics businesses should pay attention to

 

4. What are your competitors doing?

To know and understand your competitors and their context in the market, you will have thoroughly analysed your competitors, their offerings and price points, your market place, your audience segments and so on.

Also, you will know the strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and threats in your own market. To ensure you’ve done this correctly, we recommend enlisting help of a brand consultant or strategist.

 

5. How can you differentiate yourself?

Once you understand all of the above points, you will need to build the case for how you differentiate yourself. What makes your business unique and stand out from competitors?

This can be your price point, but more often than not, it’s something that makes you incredibly competitive—something that no other brand can provide. Consider any clever features your product or service has, if you have the best customer service by a mile, the newest technology or regularly updated iterations—take these aspects of your business and use them to build a name for yourself in the marketplace.

 

Related content: Brand distinctiveness: what does it mean for you?

 

To learn more about how to measure and improve your brand health, check out our free Brand Health Check ebook.

 

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Topics: Brand Health


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