Measure Your Brand Effectiveness, Online

“Become a fan of Quick.Chek.GetFresh.GoFast on Facebook!”

Kinda rolls right off your tongue, doesn't it?

Yet that is the Facebook URL for Quick Chek, a convenience store chain located in the New York metro market. It's an oddity, really. Quick Chek's website a nicely designed with a flair for fun. They prominently promote their social media presence on Facebook right on their home page (they have over 40,000 fans BTW). And Quick Chek has a fair number of indexed pages on Yahoo.

So why is it then that Quick Chek has a Heardable Score of only 171 out of 1,000? We can cite numerous issues that might impact their score, but the most glaring issue may be their lack of brand consistency.

Official company name: Quick Chek
Name as it appears in their logo: QuickCheck
Official company website URL: Quick-Chek.com
Facebook URL extension: Quick.Chek.GetFresh.GoFast
Name as it appears on Facebook pages: QuickChek and Quick Chek
Name as it appears in Wikipedia: QuickChek

Compare Quick Chek's online branding efforts to another convenience store rival, RaceTrac. RaceTrac is a neighborhood convenience store with gas stations. They have 270 stores located across five states in the Southeast USA.RaceTrac seems to have made a concerted effort to be consistent in their branding across the web.

Official company name: RaceTrac
Name as it appears in their logo: RaceTrac
Official company website URL: RaceTrac.com
Facebook URL extension: RaceTrac
Facebook extension: RaceTrac
Twitter extension: RaceTrac

RaceTrac has a slightly higher Heardable Score of 214 out of 1,000. But the real differentiator is in their sociable subscore, one of the six components that make up a Heardable Score. The sociable subscore for RaceTrac.com is 56 out of a possible 200 points. Where as Quick-Chek.com's sociable subscore is only 16 out of a possible 200 -- which is 71% less effective than RaceTrac's social media efforts.

By just looking at the numbers, it's clear to see that RaceTrac's brand consistency across the social media landscape is boosting their overall online brand effectiveness.

The fact is, brand fragmentation is bad for your business. Especially if you're using the Internet to market to new customers, communicate with existing customers, or trying to expand the visibility of your online brand. Lack of brand consistency confuses your customers, fosters distrust, and negatively effects your Heardable Score.

So why is brand fragmentation so common? The honest truth is that for most companies, employee turnover and lack of broad marketing knowledge are two of the most common culprits. It's not that brands want to behave badly. It's just that they don't know any better. Once made aware of their inconsistent branding activities, most firms try to rectify and repair their missteps.

Unfortunately, many brand managers who want to do the right thing are unable to. For example, many companies are unable to register the brand name extension they want to use on the social networks that are important to their business. They cannot use their brand name across the web because someone has beat them to the punch -- the extensions they want to use are already in use. If your company has a common brand name you could find yourself in this same position.

Our advice? Do whatever is economically feasible to ensure that your brand name is consistent across the web. Offline and online consistency is important too, as integrated branding across all marketing channels is critical to your long term success as well.

The secret to successful online marketing (and to higher Heardabe Scores) may very well depend on the quality of your synchronized, non-fragmented branding sauce.