22 Jul 08 Understanding your brand equity

 Measuring the effectiveness of offline campaigns or even how prominent your brand is in consumer mindshare can be tricky. Traditionally, this had to be measured purely from sales data, or through research companies. Finding a quick gauge just to measure the pulse of your brand has always been a little bit harder.

However, as with pretty much everything digital, tracking these traditionally unquantifiable things is becoming more of a concrete science. There are a few handy tools you can use to assess you brand equity.

Google Trends and Hitwise (both pictured below) are fantastic for measuring how many people are searching for your brand. Considering about 17% of all searches are “navigational” (by people who know where they are going), you can get some idea from this trend line of what your brand is doing in the collective consciousness.

Another interesting way to look at how much penetration your brand has gained is through a little known tool called Lexicon (from Facebook), which allows you to see not how many people are searching for your brand, but how often it is mentioned in conversation – and surprisingly this is a very different story:
Looking at the dips and spikes will give some indication of the impact of certain events. However, just because you are being talked about, doesn’t necessarily mean your brand value is going up – but usually it is better than not being talked about. The best way to see exactly what your brand stands for among the populous is with this little tool named Brand Tags – however currently it is only focusing on US brands.