What is the ROI of Branding?
“Can you measure how much value comes from your branding?”
“No…”
That’s the typical answer you’ll hear if you ask to measure the effectiveness and value of branding. The reason being, it can be a complicated answer.
Complete brands are designed to influence every touchpoint and experience between people and your brand. It can be difficult to measure incremental changes with lots of variables. Everyone from internal teams to potential customers should experience a refined story that helps change how they feel about your business.
“People don’t buy from brands, they join in.”
Branding actually can be measured by year-over-year customer engagement.
In his book The Brand Flip, Marty Neumeier creates a 4-stage scale, or ladder to better understand how people feel about your overall brand year-over-year.
The first step at the bottom is Satisfaction.
This includes your essential moments with people. Do people like your product or service? Are they happy with it? Personally, I would consider this table stakes. If your product or service isn’t good, branding is a band-aid to a larger problem. You cant polish a rotten apple.
Fairness
Beginning of Trust
Willing to Repurchase
Sense of Closure
Confidence
Once people have the essentials satisfied, they move into Delight.
They feel happy with the experience and are excited to share how you’ve made their lives easier. Think about when you’ve found a cool product, restaurant, or service. Odds are, the thought of “I know someone who would love this” or telling your friends, crosses your mind. This is where trust between you and the brand starts to grow.
Surprise
Peak Experience
Recommendations
Excitement
Boosted Trust
Once people are delighted, they move to the stage of Engagement.
This is where their delight turns into motivation and loving your brand into loyalty. At this stage, people love what you do and they have a sense of belonging with emotional attachment. People have a strong sense of Automatic Repurchasing, where they know what to expect from you and are already on board to buy again. Great examples of brands that excel in this area are Nike and Apple. Just saying that Apple is making (insert product) and engaged people want to buy.
Found Tribe/Group
Customer Loyalty
Automatic Repurchase
Emotional Attachment
Sense of Belonging
At the top of the ladder, we have Empowerment.
These people area at the highest level of brand affection. They simply wouldn’t know what to do without your product or company help. Beyond it’s intended function, your product, service or experience creates a sense of joy and happiness. If tomorrow your brand disappeared, people would be crushed. A recent example of this would be Ronzoni discontinuing their Pastina (Bon Appetit, Ronzoni's Pastina Is Discontinuing and I'm Devastated).
Personal Growth
Emotional Support
Business Success
Social Status
Deeper Fulfillment
The goal for building a brand within any business should be to move people’s feelings from being simply satisfied to enthusiastically empowered when they think of your brand. Measuring key metrics like reviews, satisfaction scores, overall engagement all contribute to a larger picture of how people engage with your brand. Auditing these results yearly give time for brand changes to apply across the brand and to shift peoples emotional connection.
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