TIQ Digital

Tag: Brand Communication

  • 6 Key Metrics to measure Internal Brand Health

    6 Key Metrics to measure Internal Brand Health

    What is Internal Branding

    Internal Branding is a corporate strategy measure to empower and motivate employees to not only retain the brand promise but to “live” it. To do this, organizations involve employees in the process of brand development, inform them about the brand, and encourage them to feel inspired about the brand in order to influence their behavior to support the brand. Internal branding is essential because brands grow from the inside out and in fact contribute to increased sales.

    To measure internal branding we can use a framework of 6 A’s of internal brand health.

    1 . Attention

    2 . Awareness

    3 . Acceptance

    4 . Advocacy

    5. Action (most critical)

    6 . Adherence

    Each factor adds up to a measurement system where you can get a heat map of the internal brand health of the organization. So you can assess your organization and can look at the pockets where the brand is delivering and where it’s not delivering. Finally, you can engage in requisite action as a result.   Let’s discuss it in detail:

    Attention

    The first aspect of measuring the internal brand health is to understand if everyone is giving attention to the definition and do all the employees understand the importance of their brand promise? For example, operations have different KPIs in their job and they are not paying attention to the image or promise that the senior level wants to portray. They probably don’t even realize what they’re doing in terms of your brand. So it attention should be given to it.

    Awareness

    Most employees do not understand their company’s strategy and in turn, they don’t understand the company’s brand promise. It is important if you can boil down the brand promise not to six, seven, eight different aspects, but maybe one or two and make everyone aware about it.

    If you do a preliminary internal review, you’ll see that across your organization, people have quite a different sense of what your brand is about.

    Acceptance

    This is really when it gets to the personal level.

    Do I personally believe in this brand’s promise?

    I might understand it, but it doesn’t mean I believe in it, I identify with it, I accept it as being the right thing. I might have other ideas for the brand.

    Segment your population into Antagonists (the ones who don’t care) and brand ambassadors or advocates who will make sure your brand message is spread.

    Advocacy

    Advocacy is all about the personal motivation you derived from the brand.

    Do your employees believe that they are positively affecting someone or some cause? A lot of people do get motivated by making a difference in other people’s’ lives.

    They sense and feel your strategy as part of their work, and that’s where the advocacy comes from.

    Action

    It is one of the most important as a lot of companies fail to implement it even after defining and designing an excellent brand structure.

    Do your employees actually know what to do in order to deliver on the brand promise?

    So imagine the fact that you have employees, they know your brand, they think branding is important, they are motivated by it, but they don’t know what to do. It’s sometimes not obvious how to deliver on the brand promise. So creating an action plan and measuring its strength is essential to measure the brand health. Reach out to us at info@technocratiq.com for a strong action plan.

    Adherence

    Now, the final one is really about adherence, do things stick? Does the environment, the culture of the organization, the rewards, recognition, the systems, the processes, do they actually help live their brand?

    So, imagine the following that if your brand is all about customer care, but then all you get rewarded is for sales. So, it’s all about how these things fit together.

    Yes, you are told to provide customer care but you know what? In a call center, you are rewarded based on the number of calls per hour. So there’s a disconnect between what we want to achieve with the brand, and what we reward people for and build the culture of the organization.

    That’s really the internal aspect of brand health.

    Conclusion

    Internal Brand Health is an early indicator therefore, you need to change things internally before you can see the results externally. It’s a significant aspect of brand health, one we do not see implemented in many organizations.

    TIQ forms a perfect alternative to solve all your queries and provide you a proper Brand Strategy. For questions or to get your company’s internal brand health monitored, drop us an email at info@technocratiq.com or call at +91 798 25 34 881.

  • Brand Image vs Brand Identity – Traditional Methods used by Brands

    Brand Image vs Brand Identity – Traditional Methods used by Brands

    A few traditional methods used by brands even today to understand the identity-image gap.

    The brand GAP that we are talking about is the gap between communicated brand identity and perceived brand image by channel members and the consumers. It is the question of Who You Are Vs How You are seen?

    Let’s take a look at how you can measure this gap.

    What is Brand Image?

    Brand image is the perception of customers for a particular brand. The image of any brand tends to develop over time.  It is formed in the minds of customers based upon the experience and interaction with the brand, interactions can be in different ways and not necessarily only the buying or using of the product or service. The major concept behind the brand image is that the consumer isn’t just buying the product or service but also the image which is associated with that product or service.

    What is Brand Identity?

    A brand identity is a collection of tools or elements used by a company to build a brand image. Brand identity and its components arise from a company’s mission, brand value proposition, competitive position on the market, long-term goals, and importance to the values and concerns of the target audience. These components have a foundational nature and, in the branding process, describe what a company wants to communicate with its target audience. Meanwhile, a brand identity defines how these foundational elements are communicated. The most common elements of a brand identity usually include:

    ➤ A brand name

    ➤ A tagline or a slogan

    ➤ A voice and a tone

    ➤ Colors and graphic styles

    ➤ A style and a typeface

    ➤ A logo and a wordmark and their variations.

    Traditional ways to capture the image identity gap

    A lot of companies perform a preliminary image identity gap analysis by capturing the brand associations from these two perspectives (internal + external). Traditional ways to capture them include:

    1. Perception surveys: This FUNNEL Model answers the questions like have we created awareness of our brand? Are people considering it? A subset of those are actually buying us, and a subset of those will buy nothing else. They’re very, very loyal to our brand.

    Alternatively, on the other hand from these we can also answer – What is the strategic health of our brand? How they’re looking at you and your competition because it’s not just about how well you’re doing, but how well you’re doing compared to others.

    2. Customer experiences forms: Brand marketers communicate with their target consumers to make them aware of brand identity and communicate the same way to the channel members directly. Channel members, in turn, convey the same to the end-users. Thus, a proper alignment of these three crucial nodes, namely, brand marketers, channel members and consumers, is inevitable for the efficient transfer of brand identity. However, in reality, not all are successful in synchronizing communicated brand identity and image perception. So, the identification and measurement of the identity-image gap are essential.

    3. Non-Traditional Method: Structuration theory proves to be a solid theory which links the elements of the branding process (culture, identity, image, and influence) to empirical efforts grounded on this theory.

    Structuration theory can acknowledge the interaction of dynamic relationships between these different facets of branding.

    Opt our Brand Strategy Services which helps you create your Brand Identity and build upon the image.

    Conclusion

    Once a gap is identified through traditional or non-traditional, it will be easy for marketers to adopt possible measures to bridge the gap. This helps brand marketers to understand the branding process more objectively. Technology is providing you with a better analysis that will help you improve your operations, strategies, and customer experience.

    TIQ forms a perfect alternative to solve all your queries and provide you the proper Brand Strategy. For questions or to share your project details with us, drop us an email at info@technocratiq.com.