Brand Metrics

Brand Metrics

Branding is the only business discipline that is able to both interrogate, define and powerfully articulate a new business vision -  and equip an organisation with the means to make it a reality by forcefully driving the strategic objectives through the organisation as a whole. By building focus points and Key Performance Indicator’s (KPI's) into the business culture, branding helps to create a motivated and measurable environment, in which the brand is actively working to provide quantifiable measures of progress and strategic efficacy.

In times of change, branding is a business essential, providing resilience against the risks posed to your softer assets, and actively creating new value by empowering an organisational culture to operate with unparalleled focus and drive – and ultimately take ownership of the markets they currently serve.

A well aligned culture is a high performing culture. When every one in an organisation feels engaged by the business strategy, valued in the collective vision, and acting through the same framework of values to deliver an exceptional and consistent service or product to their customers, the culture is a powerful asset, working hard to create maximum shareholder value. We use Key Performance Indicators, the Barrett Values Centre and the Net Promoter Score to assess, track and actively manage culture and brand performance.

Our approach is business-focussed and results-orientated.  We concentrate on using branding processes to deliver business objectives and to create real stakeholder value. We measure both hard (share price, enterprise value) and soft metrics (cultural change, employee satisfaction) as guides to measure the success of the brand.

As the following examples show, the results can be dramatic

• Following work with Brand Architects, The Benfield Group IPO was eleven-times oversubscribed. After listing, market capitalisation rose from £579m to £844m, with a corresponding profit before tax increase of 64%. At this point, Benfield was bought by Aon, who also assumed £91m of Benfield’s net debt.
• Wiggin, the media law firm, was ranked in The Times Top 100 best firms to work for in 2010.
• Gallagher Re experienced tough delivery conditions as prices softened; despite this, following work with Brand Architects, the business grew to realise $51m in 2007 and was sold to the world’s largest insurance broker, Aon, this same year.

For cultural measurement, we use The Barrett Values Centre, which powerful analysis of company culture. Using this system, leaders are empowered to measure and manage the culture of their organisations by tracking cultural behaviour, suggesting intervention points, identifying the needs of their employees and highlighting opportunities for leadership development.

Bain & Company’s Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer loyalty that condenses complex assessments into one simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” detracting the number of negative responses (or detractors) from the positive ones, an organisation can identify Net Promoter Score. This indicator is simple to use and understand, and provides a stable measure for performance, helping us to track the strength of your brand and enable you to take follow-up actions to manage your brand’s performance.

Our ultimate aim is to deliver real and enduring shareholder value through the power of branding as a strategic tool. Real value means significantly increased profits, share-price, customer satisfaction and staff retention, and vastly reduced risk, cultural conflict, talent drain and shareholder scepticism – all factors that can drastically jeopardise success, particularly in a mergers and acquisitions context. The metrics of success (ROI, measurable cultural change, share price, sales) are our benchmarks for the delivery of real shareholder value through the branding process.

The more effective the brand in driving change and creating profit, the higher the brand equity. Using branding to creating a measurable and manageable organisation empowers leaders to harness the real potential of their working culture, and create an engaged, robust and high performing set of employees who can ultimately deliver the brand promise. A brand is only worth as much as its perceived value. Value is created through trust, and trust is earned by consistently delivering a quality service or product to customers. Taking a robust approach to branding enables leadership to take control of their brand equity and realise the maximum value of their organisation.