The Benefits of Bespoke Brand Equity Models Over Standardised Models

Standard approaches to brand equity have proven relatively ineffective when taken out of the consumer-packaged-goods industry where they originated. So, is there an alternative that can actually inspire consumer action? And how can you make your business stand out when everyone is using the same brand equity models?

In this article, we explain how you can transform your brand tracker into a brand growth program that drives action and keeps you ahead of the competition using uncommon insights specifically tailored to your brand.

What Is The Standard Brand Equity Model?

For years, companies have been using standard brand equity models to understand, measure, and manage the value of a brand. In particular, these models focus on how consumers perceive and value brands and how these elements can be used to create long-term business value.

There are many popular standardised brand equity models, including:

• Aaker’s brand equity model: Developed by David Aaker, this model identifies five key elements: loyalty, awareness, perceived quality, associations, and proprietary brand assets (like logos, colours, or messages).
• Keller’s brand equity model: Created by Kevin Keller, this model emphasises the importance of generating a strong and relevant brand identity with positive brand associations.
• Interbrand’s brand valuation model: Developed by Interbrand, this model is used mainly to measure the financial value of a brand by involving factors like financial performance, customer choice, and ability to create earnings.
• Meaningfully Different Framework (MDF): Created by Kantar, this model measures how salient, meaningful and different brands are perceived to be.

Using these models, which as we mentioned were originally designed for consumer-packaged-goods industry, make it hard to carve out a competitive advantage because they don’t translate as easily to other categories and areas. In fact, most trackers use them use a retrospective review of the brand and the market.

The standardised approach to brand tracking is typically a “closed box”, whose internal workings are hidden from the observer. In other words, you can see the output but not explain how the model has arrived at it. If you use these models to, you will struggle to understand or explain what factors are driving brand growth, as the relationships and relative importance are unclear.

In opposition to this, we have developed a model that can actually transform your tackers into brand growth and turn validations into action: The bespoke brand equity model.

The Bespoke Brand Equity Model

Our brand equity model is quite different from the standard approach. This is because the principles we apply to measure brand growth have been paired with the latest behavioural and social thinking.

Thanks to this, we were able to identify four distinguished and strategic characteristics and determine how they are experienced by people to influence thinking and actions.

These are:

• See: How prominent the brand is in people's minds.
• Feel: What people’s gut emotional reaction to the brand is.
• Think: People’s logical, rational opinions of the brand.
• Do: How people behave in relation to the brand.

Each of these has different drivers or diagnostics that can also be further customised depending on your business’ sector. For example:

• See: The brand is distinctive and builds mental availability, involving sensing, buzz, history, distinctiveness, physical availability, and communication awareness or touchpoints.
• Feel: The brand evokes strong emotional connections, such as shared values, feel good, comfort, nostalgia, indulgence, badge value, or delight.
• Think: The brand conveys meaningful benefits, such as efficiency, quality, premium, variety, service or experience, value, deals, rewards, or world impact.
• Do: The brand drives desired behaviours, such as purchase actions, brand barriers, or advocacy.

Our bespoke brand growth programme is made to measure the unique challenges of your industry and category. By using the four consumer responses of see, feel, think, and do, our advanced analytic techniques can identify the unique success formula you need to grow your brand. We do this by understanding the factors that are important to your brand and category, as well as the relationships between these factors.

Advantages and Benefits of Our Bespoke Brand Growth Programme

Our unique and unconventional approach to brand growth can help you get insights that are tailored to your brand and your specific commercial goals - and not based on closed box data that is usually too generic and focused on looking back and not forward.

We are able to not just identify the actions and levers needed to drive growth, but will also present all findings in a way that is simple to grasp and explain to stakeholders.

Here are the potential benefits of using our bespoke brand growth equity model:

• Stand out from the competition.
• Become more responsive to the needs of your consumers.
• Implement a common language for your business.

But let’s go through our design process first, so you can see what we do differently.

How It Works: Our Design and Align Process

We use a data ecosystem to help you find your next growth opportunity. All of our marketing decisions are backed by a complete view of people, culture, and brands gathered via survey data, syndicated information, industry data, and various exclusive sources – including cultural trends platforms, social listening tools, and business performance metrics.

Unlike other brand equity models, our simulators also let you test the impact of all your strategic decisions before you take action, seeing which drivers affect your KPIs and which courses your solution should follow.

All of our findings are also presented using clear visuals and sharp storytelling, so you can use these deliverables to decide on your next steps. Not just that, but you will also be able to access your insights using a convenient knowledge management platform that includes brand dashboards, smart search and storage, charts, and videos.

Contact us today to find out more about our products and services and start unearthing uncommon insights, identify the exact needs and challenges of your brand and category, and simplify sharing with our award-winning knowledge management platform.