Providing a unique Canadian perspective on brand measurement, this study captures the business practices that work when managing, supporting, aligning, and measuring the success of the brand.

Study Highlights

How are Canadian companies defining "Brand"?

"Brand is all about promise & experience that people have"

The definition of brand - traditionally viewed by many as a communications based concept - has evolved to be much more. Instead, it has expanded to become a customer experience based concept. This definition likely marks a new perspective in brand measurement and management; an evolution that reflects the pressures that have been continuously mounting on traditional branding efforts, including:

• the emergence of the multi channeled, highly interactive world;
• the increased proliferation of new products;
• today's pervasiveness of brand messaging; and
• the commoditization of many categories of products.

What role does brand culture play?

Organizations tend to orient their scope of measurement based on their cultural approach to brand strategy. Based on self-identified brand centricity, the findings within this research suggests that there exist three distinct organizational cultures associated with the measurement and management of brands - and the culture typifies the scope of measurement and management approaches used by an organization.

Quantity or Quality: Optimizing the Scope of Brand Measurement

One very important perspective is that regardless of variations in brand cultures, there is ample opportunity to improve upon the scope of brand measurement. This can take the form of broadening the number of measures that are used to assess brand efforts (to include robust financial impact measures, customer behaviour and customer perception measures). It can also take the form of having a regular process to measure the brand - even among the brand centric organizations, less than half have a regular and formalized measurement process in place.

Another important consideration is that very few organizations have been able to grow their measurement scope to meet the current definition of "brand". Most continue to focus on communications and/or financial impact, yet few have been able to effectively measure and manage a branded, multi channel customer experience.

How to get to the next level: Internal Alignment & Required Governance

Just as important as the set of measured variables, is gaining internal alignment around brand priorities and adopting a formalized governance framework to enable the collection and interpretation of measures from across the organization that reflects the "customer experience" approach.

The governance framework is the foundation of all "Brand as an Experience" activity within a company. It manages the processes that control the way brand based initiatives are developed in a company. The governance framework helps a company to set priorities and determine the internal process, organization and technology initiatives to be followed when executing the activities.

The CMA Brand Metrics Study has a dedicated section called Making it Work: An Introduction to the Multi Functional Governance Framework that provides marketers with an approach to executing a unified customer experience-based business strategy. The infrastructure required to facilitate this strategy will help minimize costs and offer development time, leverage synergies across the organization and maximize a company's scale economies.

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