Measure your brand cues instead of guessing

A distinctive asset is anything other than the name that brings your brand to mind: a logo, a colour, a pack shape, a character, a sound, a tagline. Many decisions about which ones to keep, which to push and which to retire are made on the judgment of the people who run the brand. A recent study tested how good that judgment is. The guesses were rarely close, and they went wrong in a way that can lead a brand to drop a good asset.

Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute took about 400 brand elements from 50 brands, across soft drinks, snacks, supermarkets, financial services and beer in seven countries. They showed each element to people who buy in the category and asked which brand came to mind. That gave every element two scores. Fame is how many buyers linked it to the right brand. Uniqueness is how much of what buyers named went to the right brand rather than a rival. Then more than 150 marketers, mostly people who manage those brands, guessed both scores before they saw the results.

The guesses were rarely close to what buyers said. Even on a rough test, placing each element in the right box of a simple grid of strong and weak, the marketers were wrong more often than right. They were no better on their own brand's elements than on a competitor's. And the errors ran in opposite directions. Marketers thought more buyers knew the elements than really did, and they thought more of those elements got credited to rivals than really did. Elements that were already strong were the easiest to judge, and the ones in the middle were the hardest.

The study didn't follow what the marketers went on to decide, but the two errors point to different mistakes. If you overrate fame, you may think an element is already doing the branding job when many buyers don't know it yet, and lean on it without the name beside it. If you underrate uniqueness, you may think a cue points to rivals when it mostly points to you, and drop a good asset before it has had time to build. Both choices come up when a pack, a logo or a campaign is changed.

It helps to know what the study covers. The marketers had some interest or background in the subject, and some training before they guessed, which may have made their guesses more accurate than other marketers' would be. The brand owners chose and paid for which elements were tested, so the elements are not a random sample, and none of them turned out to be well known but shared with rivals, so the study says nothing about that kind. Most of the categories are packaged goods and retail, with one service category. And it measured whether buyers link an element to the brand, not whether it sold anything.

So what can you do with it? List every element your brand uses and test each one with people who buy in your category, asking which brand it brings to mind. Keep both scores, fame and uniqueness, and test again over time. Do it before you drop or change an element, because that is when a wrong guess costs most. An element that fewer buyers know but that points mostly to you is worth building rather than dropping. Where a survey is out of reach, treat your judgment as a guess until you can test it. Paul has written about how the National Lottery built and measured its assets, which is this in practice.

Charlie