Making Success Measurable
15.8.2023
A good brand thrives on feelings and moods – and these can be surveyed! In the car trade, it is easy to measure the success of the sales team: so many cars were sold in the last quarter – that is x times more than in the quarter before. The revenue target was thus exceeded by a pleasingly clear margin. That is what success can sound like. In performance marketing, Google and other providers offer corresponding user interfaces that give insights into the figures: what and whom have we reached? However, figures do not necessarily reflect the whole truth about a brand, but usually only a part of it.
Brand Is Emotion
Because as we all know: brand is emotion. And feelings are hard to translate into numbers, data and facts. So the question is: are there alternative ways to measure the success of a design or brand development? How do you determine whether blue works better than red? How are we to know whether changing the typeface (and the associated font licence costing several thousand euros) was worth it? Why do we actually have to change the logo? Hasn’t it worked perfectly well so far? And if we did change it – did the colour adjustment really bring a better sales result?
Qualitative Interviews
We are asked these and similar questions again and again. Especially by marketing departments that have to report to a higher-level department or even to the management. And this is where we can regularly help. From my experience, I always recommend a variety of methods for making the success of a brand measurable. One particularly simple but very effective measure is to conduct qualitative interviews. For example, we can ask within the workforce how they rate their own brand. With a polarity profile, for instance, one can start with a fairly low-threshold question: “How modern do you find the brand?” There are five answers to choose from: progressive, modern, timeless, dated, old-fashioned. In this way we definitely get feedback on the perceived, but of course not the factual, truth based on the inner perception of our employees.
A Survey Procedure That Helps Brand Managers
We can also, to a certain extent, survey emotions and moods. Here are a few more examples: is the typeface perceived as more technical or more human? Does the colour come across as warm or cold? Is the typeface easy to read? Or should another one from the shortlist be used instead? Even though, as brand experts and designers, we can often already guess or even know the answers from experience, the procedure described helps the brand managers on the client side. Above all when we propose design developments and concepts that are particularly progressive, therefore seem different from the competition and so appear unfamiliar at first. In iterative loops, one gradually approaches a condensed cluster of information about one’s own brand.
„Especially in the getting-to-know-you phase, it is important to question things the client has set in advance and to get to know the client and their target group(s) in depth. Here too, it is a matter of getting a feel for the project and the subject and of repeatedly seeking feedback and asking questions. That way, you stay on the same track and together reach the goal set beforehand.“Katja Kleefeld, Senior Designer Arndtteunissen
Visual Metaphor
With corporate design, too, qualitative interviews can reveal whether, for example, clients or employees express a certain feeling that the brand is also meant to convey. In the best case, the brand is attributed attributes similar to those we defined in advance during the brand work. After all, design is nothing other than a visual metaphor for the previously defined brand values or the content-related direction of the brand.
War for Talents
A clear indicator of a brand’s success lies in employer marketing. Today we speak of the “War for Talents”. As is well known, employees have long been able to choose where they want to work. It is all the more important to be, or to become, a company (and a brand) that people want to work for. The HR department will find out fairly quickly that it receives better-qualified and better applications when the fit of its brand is right. This is where good brand work pays off financially straight away: speculative applications generally increase, while the costs of elaborate recruitment processes and headhunters decrease. We have been able to observe this with our clients over the past five years.
Conduct Interviews Regularly
These are just a few examples of how the success of a brand can be made measurable. There really are very many different tools that can be applied, depending on the question, to measure brand value. It is advisable to conduct such surveys and interviews regularly. Some of our clients do so every two years. The insights gained are always very helpful and strengthen the work of a good in-house team and its collaboration with the agency.
Developing Together
Demonstrably good brand work also means that companies do not constantly have to deal with new service providers. Procurement’s general requirement to “put the creative agency work out to tender again” may thus become unnecessary: “Never touch a running system”. After all, a good agency and a good marketing department also develop together and, at best, work constantly on the brand’s positive image. And through regular review, you can see whether you are still on the right path.