Is Your Business Competing?

There are lots of different factors you need to take into account when you’re trying to measure your business’ success. Success is not a simple concept, and you need to consider not just raw revenue, but revenue retention, profits, and also how competitive your business is when compared to its rivals.

If you’re not aware of how your business ranks when compared with your closest rivals, then you’re only seeing half the picture. Failing to notice the momentum gathered by one of your competitors means your revenue dominance could suddenly come to an end as they sweep past you and dominate both the market and your consumers’ mindshare – their awareness of your brand.

Finding out if your business is competing in this way means working with a market research firm – only the specialists in the field have the expertise and perspective to give you objective answers. One of the things working with a market research agency gives you access to is their Brand Index, and your place in it.

A brand index is a ranking of all the brands within a certain niche (be that beauty business, property management companies or clothing brands), constructed out of the key qualities that together make up a business’ brand equity – their ability to turn reputation into sales.

Unprompted Recall

This is the extent to which consumers think of your brand in association with your industry. You may be familiar with surveys that prompt respondents to name as many automobile brands, or underarm deodorants as they can, from memory.

This is a vital metric to measure the success of your business. An established brand should rank highly for unprompted recall, with customers well aware of its reputation. If you’re not capturing more and more share of this unprompted recall, then you may have a marketing issue, and your business is not competing.

Purchase Intent

After recalling the existence of the brand, consumers are asked about their intent to make a purchase (the next time it would be relevant). A high unprompted recall level followed by low purchase intent suggests your marketing has got your brand good exposure, but something about your offering, be it price or product design needs attention.

Net Promoter Score

This is the likelihood of a consumer recommending your service or goods to a friend – again, a high score shows a successful brand that follows through on its promises, while a low one shows that something has disappointed a customer between their initial contact with their brand and making the decision to buy, and using your products.

Brand Equity

Taken together these metrics turn into a measure of your brand equity, and a ranking of businesses by brand equity constitutes the brand index. Seeing where you fall in your industry’s brand index, and crucially how that changes over time shows you how your business is competing with its rivals and is one of the most important measures of success. You can find some ideas for improving your company branding with the Brand Stories business experts.