What is Brand Health?

Following up on yesterday's post about financial ratios, and predictors of business success, today I'm plugging away at Brand Health.

Again, armed with my basic knowledge and Google, I set out to define ...

Brand Health 101.

Unlike the hard-and-fast & tried-and-true financial ratios, there is no standard and limited information floating around out there about Brand Health. It is something of an art and science. Available information is vague but critical, and is largely controlled by Agencies. Hmmm ... sounds sort of like Advertising.

One important commonality among the definitions of Brand Health is that Healthy Brands can command and sustain price premiums, and Healthy Brands can better sustain themselves in the face of adversity.

Among the many websites I found through Google to compile this summary of Brand Health, these were the most helpful:

• Angus Reid Strategies
• MarketingProfs.com
  
• Marketing Science Institute
• Neilson
  

And here's a quick run-down on what Brand Health is and how to measure it ...

If you generally define Brand as what people think of your product or service, then it flows that Brand Health is a measure of how they think of your Brand. To that end, Brand Equity (a quantitative measure of the value of the brand in the consumers' minds which is often assigned a dollar value and reported as an asset on balance sheets) could be considered a sub-set of Brand Health. Sometimes it is even considered to be the measure for Brand Health.

Otherwise, to measure Brand Health you have to be able to determine what a consumer's relationship is with your product or service, and answer questions such as:

• What they know of it?
• How they intereact with it?
• How they use it?
• What they think of its performance?
• Their emotional bond to it?
• The place it has in their heart?
• The place it has in their wallets?
• What they believe the attributes of it are?
• What their distinct image of it is (perhaps their "Onliness")?

In their paper "Towards a System for Monitoring Brand Health from Store Scanner Data", authors Bhattacharya and Lodish define brand health using established notions of health. The two dimensions of Brand Health they say are:

• Current wellbeing — a brand's attraction to consumers in an environment where all brands are operating under typical, normal conditions, and
• Resistance — a brand's attraction to consumers when it is under attack from competition or from other elements in the macro-environment (e.g., when a new product enters the market).

Very interesting of course. In practical perspective, how is one to measure Brand Health? One way is to call up Angus Reid Strategies. They have a proprietary Brand Assessment Measure tool (BAM), that has four measures: Knowledge, Uniformity, Originality and Power. Their BAM score is well recognized and is derived from analyses of people's responses to the full set of brand attributes.