In order to be a category leader, maintaining strong brand health is vital, thus establishing a gold standard that measures and tracks brand health, and fixes it early on if it is performing poorly, should be a priority for business leaders.
What is brand health?
Brand health is an umbrella term that defines the effectiveness with which a brand or a company delivers on the promise it makes to the customer, based on product attributes and service delivered.
Consistency, quality, novelty, and attributes build memorable and unique experiences for the customer thus enhancing the brand health. In an age of hyper-personalisation ensuring your brand is healthy means leveraging intelligent analytics all the way from product design to delivery.
Why is brand health important?
Future-focused organisations are increasingly evaluating business operations that back customer experience. Brand management is no longer about product appeal, marketing, advertising, or customer service. The new-age customer wants seamless service delivery, thus logistics, inventory, invoicing is now encompassed in the new revenue and customer experience modelling.
Organisations are putting brand health under the microscope as it is a true metric for overall organisational health, given how critically it can affect revenue growth, operational performance, investor perception, and new product development. Brand health is being tracked and evaluated not just by CMOs but also CROs, CFOs and CEOs given it is very closely tied to the organisation’s risk profile.
Brand Health Risks
Today’s consumer has infinite choices and extremely high expectations from brands. The consumer is also making value-based choices from sustainability, price sensitivity, ease of purchase, virtual interfaces, and personal health.
Whilst many organisations are still adjusting to the more basic challenges of a digital world, such as managing negative buzz on social media or providing a consistent omnichannel brand experience the consumer is already in the virtual world ready to experiment with augmented and metaverse.
As such, if brands want to be category leaders and have a strong brand health, they must be agile, completely aligned at the C-suite level and building a culture that embraces and drives change constantly.
Brand Health Planning
Ensuring your organization has a playbook for brand service standardization is vital in today’s fast-changing world. The questions the playbook should address are:
What is the optimum customer experience you wish to offer?
What is the game plan to address key findings and feedback from customer research and focus groups with agility?
How do you codify brand service standards?
How do you define who holds accountability to maintain the brand service standards?
How will various departments and employees be responsible for creating a seamless customer experience?
What infrastructure and process improvements will elevate or support the desired behavior?
Every organisation needs to ascertain its tolerance for brand health tradeoffs based on it's year on year commercial and growth projections. Whilst preserving brand health is crucial, decisions need to be made on when to persevere and when to exit.
