There are many things that make a successful brand, but none is as frail and hard to measure as a social value. And yet it’s precisely social value, i.e. perceived and not actual worth, that is often the magic ingredient behind lavish purchase decisions and enviable customer loyalty.
In an attempt to define social value, marketers came up with the brand equity metric — a brand’s extra value in customers’ eyes. Inspired by Apple’s (and Orange’s) of the global market, companies are striving to grow their social value and win the loyalty of customers willing to pay top penny for every new product and service.
In this post, we’ll take a look at what brand equity is made of and how to measure it with the most precision.
What makes up brand equity?
The value customers assign to a brand is not completely unfathomable and is in fact determined by three key groups of metrics:
- financial — market share, price, branding investment, etc.
- strength — accessibility, customer loyalty, retention, etc.
- consumer — sentiment, emotional connection, brand perception, etc.
While financial metrics are the easiest to put into numbers, strength, and consumer metrics are the least quantifiable. Luckily, there are tools built to analyze real customer conversations around brands on social media and the web. These fall into the social listening category and provide an assessment of consumer behaviors online.
Regardless of what social media analytics tools you choose to use, there are metrics you can rely on in measuring brand equity. Below is an overview and a how-to.
Behind every metric obtained in the course of social media listening are real-user conversations and social interactions available for searching, filtering, and engaging with. When you dive into brand mentions per se, you get to meet the people behind your brand mentions, uncover their concerns, and fetch feedback on every part of their customer journeys.
Brand equity is the secret ingredient behind many purchase decisions. By learning to measure and grow social value, brands gain decades of customer loyalty and new clients excited about products and services, oftentimes regardless of the price tag. I hope you can use this post as a checklist for assessing and improving your brand equity. There are many perks to discover along the way, so make sure you give it a try.
