media planning & buying

Average Americans aren't the only ones fretting over healthcare issues. Brand health is becoming one of the hottest topics in the CMO community. Two forces are driving the sudden interest in metrics and "brand dashboards." Managers are growing more metrics-focused because of the rising use of online media in the total marketing mix. Online media allows managers to see a direct cause-and-effect relationship between a demand generation initiative and sales. It's only natural that the same managers would start to ask, "How much is my brand driving sales?"

The other factor is money, or more precisely, the scarcity of money. Marketing budgets are usually the last to recover when an economy rises from the ashes of a recession. Every expense is scrutinized. Before investing money on a brand, it's helpful to assess your brand's overall health. Think about it: Would you be willing to let a doctor perform a procedure on your body without first doing an examination? Probably not.

When funds are scarce and investments are heavily scrutinized, you owe it to your shareholders to assess your state of wellness, or lack thereof. Unfortunately, many managers think that measuring brand health is a massive endeavor that requires quant jocks running loose with expensive studies, time-consuming audits, and complex statistical analyses. They fear that in the end they'll be sitting around a table scratching their heads trying to make sense of all the data sets, still clueless where to invest. It doesn't have to be this way. Here are four time-tested diagnostic areas to consider when assessing your brand's health.

Awareness
Brand awareness is by far the easiest and the least expensive driver to measure. It answers a simple question: Do people know my brand exists? It is usually measured first in an unaided format, and then benchmarked against results from respondents after a little prompting.

Brand awareness is critical for new or emerging brands, where the battle is for recognition. In fact, if awareness is very low, it isn't worth the time or money to measure most other equity drivers. The mandate for the emerging brand is to win a piece of the target's mental real estate. Awareness is the diagnostic tool to track your progress.

The corollary is often also true. Coca-Cola doesn't need to spend a lot of money on brand awareness. It has nearly 100 percent awareness in just about every corner of the world, and in just about every demographic and socio-cultural segment. In the same way that politicians are lamenting the bloated cost to U.S. taxpayers from the physicians ordering too many unrequired medical tests, many brands can skip measuring awareness.

There are occasions when it makes sense for a well-established brand to measure awareness. One example is when it is trying to measure generational decay. For example, a brand like Borden's Milk might have very high awareness with baby boomers but near zero awareness with millennials. In this case, awareness by demographic segmentation might yield useful strategic insights. Otherwise, save your money and the respondent's time. Move up the hierarchy of brand equity.

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