Measure Your Brand Effectiveness, Online

Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken at The Blake Project publish a fantastic, content-rich blog all about branding. Branding Strategy Insider is overflowing with insightful articles and insider tips that would benefit any C-level marketer or executive looking to gain a deeper appreciation or understanding of what makes a great brand.

The right-hand column of their blog includes a list of the 10 benefits of building strong brands. Team Heardable examined their list and we heartily endorse their findings!

Benefits of Building Strong Brands

   1. Increased revenues and market share
   2. Decreased price sensitivity
   3. Increased customer loyalty
   4. Additional leverage with vendors and retailers (for manufacturers)
   5. Increased profitability
   6. Increased stock price, shareholder value and sale value
   7. Increased clarity of vision
   8. Increased ability to mobilize an organization's people and focus its activities
   9. Increased ability to expand into new product and service categories
  10. Increased ability to attract and retain high quality employees

Building and maintaining a strong brand is not easy. But Daye and VanAuken clearly lay out 10 significant benefits that a strong brand brings to an organization. 
 
Heardable believes in the power of strong brands as well. That's one of the reasons we created the Heardable platform -- to make it easier for companies to assess the effectiveness of their online brands, with the ability to juxtapose results against one's competitors, then helping to demystify the why so that strategies could be created to attack the what, how and when.
 
Organizations with strong Heardable Scores tend to have powerful brands as well. See for yourself by examining our Heardable 100 List of top brands ranked by Heardable Score. But it's not always the case. Sometimes strong offline brands are doing a terrible job online, and vice versa. We see a convergence underway. Offline and online are both critically important factors to brand success -- with the growth curve leaning towards online, in most areas.

Heardable believes that if you measure brand strennth by only looking at traditional metrics, you are not seeing the entire brand picture. For example, there are a few popular annual brand ranking surveys published by giants like Pew Research and Interbrand that examine factors such as brand value, contribution, customer insights, annual revenue and momentum. Some of this data is spot on, some is subjective, andother data points are based on educated best-guesses. 
 
Clearly a brandformation is underway. The branding sandbox is full of cool new toys like Heardable. We strongly believe that factors such as one's Heardable Score will soon be added to the brand valuation equation as 'online' becomes more deeply engrained into every aspect of a brand's being. To ignore it or discount it is simply shortsighted. As any bleeding-edge marketer of today already knows -- the Internet is here, it's redefining entire industries, and it's shaking up the classification of businesses and business models themselves. 
 
In many ways, the online experience has become the brand, or at least, a critical extension of it. 
 
Heady stuff to ponder. We welcome your thoughts and feedback.