Keeping track of your brand’s performance can help you to decide on necessary steps to take to improve your branding and help you stand out from other competing brands. But what does it take for you to track the brand performance, especially when you are still an up-and-coming brand?

About Brand Performance

Branding is the process of crafting the personality of a brand, and within it, ‘Brand Performance’ is defined by the measurement of a brand’s outcome against its initial goals.

 
Across different brands, their brand performance can vary drastically due to various factors. Monitoring brand performance is key to helping brands discern their ranking amongst their competitors in the industry and hence aid these brands to remain relevant, competitive, and profitable. Today, there are many existing indexes that measure and quantify brand performance in the market, but these measurements are only relevant for more established Multi-National Corporations (MNCs).

Opportunity In Measuring Brand Performance

By coming up with a brand performance measurement tool customised and localised for local SMEs, Firefish has identified the opportunity to help smaller firms measure their brand performance.

Firefish Index

Firefish Index (“FFI”), created by Firefish, aims to be applicable across a range of SMEs regardless of their size. The index seeks to give a rough picture of brand performance and highlight potential areas for improvement.

What does FFI measure?

1. Employee satisfaction
The most important asset of a company is none other than its employees. Prioritising your employee’s satisfaction does help in improving the company’s overall performance and satisfied employees can result in having satisfied customers. Furthermore, your employees could also potentially advocate for your company, furthering its success. The extent to which an employee is satisfied with his job can also influence their receptivity towards organisationally generated information. Given that employees are willing to receive organisationally generated information if appropriate brand knowledge is realised, a positive employee attitude towards their jobs is significant.
 
2. Employee recognition
When companies implement and emphasise successful rewards and recognition programme, employees would more likely feel more appreciated, achieve their esteem needs, and become more efficient and productive at work.
 
3. Employee engagement
Employee engagement measures how an employee feels, thinks, acts to achieve the company’s goals, and overall his/her overall commitment to the company. A part of employee engagement also consists of employee involvement, which is about the extent to which employees will actively participate in organisational initiatives like providing feedback or shaping customers’ decision-making. Such involvement is perceived to strengthen the employee’s commitment to the company. On the other hand, role clarity is another important aspect of employee engagement. With a clearer understanding of their role, employees would participate more actively in company’s events and stay committed to the company.
 
4. Work environment and wellness
Both the working environment and employee benefits play a role in an employee’s contentment level. Prioritising your employees’ well-being can improve their productivity level and retain high-performance employees in the long run.
 
5. Employee growth/development
Emphasising employee development can allow the company to create a more dynamic learning environment and highly motivated work culture. This helps to encourage all employees to learn and acquire new learnings while enhancing their skills, resulting in overall better work performance.
 
6. Brand awareness
Brand awareness is the probability that customers recognize your brand, products, or services. Customers’ knowledge about the brand could influence their decisions when differentiating and choosing between competing brands. With high brand awareness, repeat purchases can be encouraged, thus leading to an increase in market share and incremental sales. Brand awareness is also particularly vital to businesses that market proactively through social media sites. Studies also showed that the brands that customers recognise easily are more likely to be in their shopping considerations.
 
7. Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction can be useful in helping brands understand how customers feel about their experience. Metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are good indicators of customer loyalty and happiness. NPS measures customer satisfaction through word-of-mouth and focuses on the referability of the brand, CSAT can help brands have a more in-depth understanding of customer satisfaction, while CES provides insights on how effortful or effortless it is for customers to interact with the brand.
 
8. Brand relevance
Brand relevance measures how relevant the customer perceives the brand’s products and services to be. It is a company’s ability to connect with people’s emotions and become more relevant to them. Customers are constantly seeking solutions to challenges and problems, while the environment changes constantly. To remain relevant, brands must adjust or shift themselves to adapt to the changes.
 
9. Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty refers to a behavior pattern where customers attach positive associations with a brand, become committed, and make repeated purchases from the brand over time. With strong brand loyalty, brands benefit through customers’ advocacy. One way to measure brand loyalty is through customers’ willingness to search as customers will less likely settle for a second-choice product if their first choice is available. It gives us insights regarding the attitudes of your customers and whether their position in the market is defensible against sustained pressure from competing brands.
 
10. Perceived quality
Perceived quality is the customers’ perception of the overall quality/image of the brand or its product/service with regards to its purpose of use against other brands. It differs from the actual functional aspects of the product/service and is more focused on factors like distinct attributes and brand image. By improving customers’ perceived quality, brands can improve their products/services to become more desirable. It also improves customer retention, builds brand trust, and return on investment.
 
11. Perceived value
Perceived value is the customers’ perception of a brand’s product/service’s merit or desirability for them, against competing brands. It can be measured by the price customers are willing to pay for the brand’s product/service when they view the benefit in relation to the cost. For example, emotional benefits like the sense of prestige from owning luxury items increase customers’ perceived value of the luxury brand. Studies has also shown that customers are willing to pay more for brands with stronger reputations and perceived uniqueness.
 
12. Brand differentiation
Brand differentiation helps brands to discover their qualities which might be their unique selling point. This could allow the brand to stand out from its competitors, improve customer experience, and promote stronger brand loyalty. Eventually, the brand can command a higher price point to further elevate its status in the market.
 
13. Future readiness
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting has grown in popularity over the years, with increasing concern about what brands are doing to help make the world a better place. This is equally important for SMEs as it is an opportunity for brand enhancement. Additionally, the outbreak of the pandemic made conscious consumerism more relevant, causing the measurement of ESG to become more important.

What Now?

With all these factors in mind, Firefish index can help you to measure your brand performance here and allow you to consider what are the next few steps to improve your branding.