Brand Aperture™
A new way to measure brand performance
If Go-to Brands work differently and are created and managed differently, then we’ve got to change how we measure them, too.
That’s why we created Brand Aperture℠ — a suite of intuitive tools specifically tailored to the task of building and sustaining Go-to Brands.
At its core is the Brand Aperture℠ diagnostic, which does two key things: measures brand performance on key metrics and provides guidance for brand-building. It was built with an initial knowledge base covering 600 brands, and is continuing to grow.
We’re constantly adding data through incremental research using the same frameworks and metrics. In turn, that new data provides exponentially more insight on what makes a Go-to Brand.
Brand Aperture℠ Diagnose provides critical insights to build more meaningful relationships with your customers.
More than another index
In Brand Aperture℠ Diagnose, we did much more than develop another index. We created an insight-driven diagnostic tool that creative leaders can leverage to build more meaningful relationships with their customers.
And because those insights are actionable and future-focused, brands gain direction on how to express themselves and how to innovate. Ultimately, Brand Aperture℠ Diagnose provides practical ways to drive immediate and far-reaching impact.
Brand Aperture℠ Diagnose delivers a collection of prescriptive views of brand performance based on factors that we know to drive revenue growth and business resilience:
Brand profile
In this view we measure brand performance today and what it takes to improve. This is where brands are classified in one of four categories (Transactional, Comfort, Enabling or Go-to) based on their current ability to build connection and enable progress.
Emotional depth
In this view we reveal how people feel when interacting with a brand, recording the frequency and intensity of emotions felt across the brand’s experience. We also collect verbatim comments from brand enthusiasts and rejectors; when paired with the quantitative data, we get an insightful picture of how people feel.
Future readiness
This view’s metrics focus on the brand’s momentum, asking if a brand’s best days are ahead or behind it. We can also assess a brand’s fitness to serve the customer of the future, based on the future trends that we anticipate.
This rigorous approach rests on several foundations:
- A robust and large scale research design building and improving on work that we’ve been developing for over a decade;
- Hypothesis-led analytical frameworks, based on decades of brand-building experience and academic research, and validated by evaluating the relative business performance of Go-to Brands; and,
- A balance of outcome and driver metrics to inform both performance tracking and direction-setting.
Brand Aperture℠ Diagnose is available as a single interactive tool, allowing you to compare your brand against any others in the knowledge base and on any or all of the dimensions above. The diagnostic works seamlessly across categories (just as many Go-to Brands do), so you can easily compare bank brands, tech brands, retail brands, and many more.
In addition to the Diagnose, Brand Aperture℠ provides a comprehensive suite of measurement tools to build and sustain Go-to Brands:
Value
Our valuation approach delivers a clear evaluation of a brand’s current and potential value — not based on financial statements but instead grounded in the reality of how the brand works in the marketplace. It’s a direct measure of the brand’s power to shift customer demand. It provides a sense of where the brand should invest, based on the strongest drivers in the market, in order to maximize value over time.
Target
A deep understanding of your target group is critical to building the connection of a Go-to Brand and to delivering progress against the specific struggles faced by that group. Our segmentation approach defines distinct groups of people based on the dimensions most directive of connection and progress, focusing both on insight about people in order to shape the brand strategy and on how to influence people’s behaviors to activate it.
Engage
The ideas and frameworks for Go-to Brands apply to employees, as well as to customers. Employees want to feel a connection, a shared identity, with the place where they work, and they want to make progress in their lives and careers. But employees aren’t just an audience for the brand—they are also the brand’s most important deliverer. This is where enablement become an important third element. So, we bring this framework into the organization, helping you build a Go-to Brand from the inside-out.
Track
Too often, all these insights and approaches work against the grain, unrelated to the traditional metrics used in the brand trackers and KPIs. We use Brand Aperture℠ to provide a comprehensive brand management and measurement system, so that what you track and reward is aligned with what will create impact for your business.
Want to learn more about Brand Aperture℠?
Click here to read more about our suite of performance measurement tools to build and sustain Go-to Brands, or reach out directly.