Keeping track of the health of your brand is one of the most important ways you can make sure your decisions are creating successful outcomes from your business. Your brand health provides you with a quick read of the general state of your business, as customers construct your brand from every interaction they have with your company, from encountering your marketing to buying a product, and therefore potentially every decision you make helps to strengthen and weaken your brand.

How to Check on the Health of Your Brand

You’ll need to partner with a dedicated market research agency to get an accurate health check on your brand: you need the reach to get data from people who haven’t spent money with you yet, not just already loyal customers. You also need the expertise to analyse that data and derive the insights from it that will build your understanding of what’s going on with your brand.

When you find a market research firm to partner with, they can monitor your brand using certain key metrics.

Net Promoter Score

This is an increasingly popular way for commercial businesses to measure their success: it tells you how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others, telling in one result if you’re striking the balance with quality, pricing and customer experience.

You find your NPS with a relatively simple calculation: you ask your customers to rate, on a scale of 1 – 10 how likely they are to recommend your business. Adding up the number of 9s and 10s gives you your Promoter Score. The total of 1 and 2 ratings is your Detractor Score. Subtracting Detractors from Promoters gives you your Net Promoter Score.

Brand Recall

There are two kinds of brand recall (or awareness) that make interesting health checks on your brand: unprompted and prompted.

Unprompted brand recall simply asks if customers have heard of you. When asked to list brands in your niche, if they list you, they’ve heard of you, and the earlier in their list you come, the better.

Prompted brand recall is also known as preference in category: respondents are given a list of brands and asked which ones they have heard of or would consider buying from, giving you an idea of how you compare with your rivals.

Brand Uplift

This is the measure of the value your brand imparts to your products, and it can be measured by testing live adverts. If you serve two strands of advertising, identical except for the inclusion of your branding, and compare the difference in clickthrough rates, you can see just how persuasive your brand is as a tool in your marketing armoury.

These are just a few of the techniques market researches can use to run a health check on your brand and tell you how well your business is performing.