How to Value Your Brand Equity (And Then Improve It)

Brand equity is sometimes described as the value of your brand, but it’s not the cash assets or office inventory - it’s the perception of customers. It can feel particularly intangible as it’s made up of a number of factors, but establishing the value of your brand equity can be useful for both marketing and the overall business strategy.

Valuing your brand equity

Work out the value of your brand equity by looking at:

• Brand visibility and awareness
• Customer loyalty
• Brand associations
• Brand perceptions

By analyzing all of these factors together you can work out the strength of your brand equity and compare it to other businesses of a similar size. Large companies like Apple and Nike have strong brand equity, enabling them to attract and retain customers.

Since loyal customers are seven times as likely to forgive a company if it makes a mistake, brand equity can be monetized too. Once you’ve established the value of your brand equity, there are a number of things you can do to improve it.

Consistent quality of products or services

There’s often a lot of pressure for companies to be seen to release new products regularly, but this can lead to them being marketed before they’re ready. Items going out to customers that haven’t  been fully tested or don’t  meet the expected performance standard can erode brand equity, especially if a business is fairly new.

Build brand awareness and brand recognition

While brand awareness and recognition can sometimes be confused with brand equity, they’re different but related. Having strong brand awareness is a foundation block for good brand equity, and requires a strong marketing campaign to ensure potential customers know your business and its products or services exist. Email marketing, direct mail and social media are all areas where brand awareness can benefit.

One step further than brand awareness is brand recognition, where your logo becomes instantly recognizable and associated with certain attributes. You want your audience to instantly know your brand’s story, its messaging and your core values as soon as they see your logo, packaging or tagline. One of the best ways to achieve this is through content marketing, where blogs, articles and videos all contribute to your brand being recognized and respected.

Present a consistent image

It’s important for any business to understand the market it operates within and its place in it from the start. Every part of the company’s operations and especially its marketing should then feed into a brand image based on those findings. This means premium products must consistently give off an air of luxury, and entertainment services should always be fun; any diversion from that will conflict with a customer’s impression of the brand.

Be innovative

Keeping an eye on the activities of competitors is important, not only to ensure that you’re meeting the same standards, but also to surpass them. Good brand equity comes from standing out from the crowd and showing that your company is innovative and a leader in the field. That means understanding your customers’ needs and finding ways to service them in a new and unique way ahead of the competition.

Open up a two-way relationship

It’s easy to fall into the trap of always telling customers what you can do for them and not listening to their opinions. Brands that do well ask their audience what they want, create offerings based on the responses, ask again, answer any questions they have and then ask again. This should be an ongoing process in which consumers feel involved and their opinions valued to create loyalty.

Partnering with a successful brand

Piggybacking on the brand equity of another business is one way to improve the perception of your own company. After all, if a company that a consumer respects is prepared to work with yours then some of that loyalty is likely to rub off on you. In order for partnerships to be successful and agreed upon in the first place, the two companies must have similar values and wish to appeal to the same customer base. If your business is less well-known it could be harder to establish a partnership, but the results could be worth the effort.