The brand report card is an easy tool to evaluate the strength of your brand against 10 attributes shared by the world’s most effective brands.
It’s hard to overstate the value of a strong brand. Beyond its immediate impact on your bottom line, strengthening your brand maximizes its value over the long run.
The problem is, few marketers are able to step back and objectively assess their brand’s strengths and weaknesses. And most business owners would be hard pressed to even identify the factors they should consider.
Enter the brand report card.
In what follows, we’ll take a look at what a brand report card is, who should use it, and how to grade your brand against 10 attributes shared by the world’s strongest brands.
CONTENTS
- What is a Brand Report Card?
- Who Should Use a Brand Report Card and Why?
- The Brand Report Card
- Grading Your Brand
- The Takeaway
What is a Brand Report Card?
A brand report card is a simple way to evaluate the strength your brand against 10 attributes shared by the world’s most effective brands.
Also known as a brand scorecard, a brand report card is a system to score your brand on things like your brand compass, competitive differentiation, brand relevance, brand architecture, consistency, and more.
A brand report card allows you to take some subjectivity out of the evaluation of your brand by evaluating it against a number of universal criteria.
Who Should Use a Brand Report Card and Why?
The brand report card is a useful tool for anyone tasked with ensuring the strength and effectiveness of a business’s brand. This includes business owners, brand managers, marketers, and more.
The answer to why you should use the brand report card is simple: your brand is your company’s most valuable asset. And it’s important to ensure your brand is optimized to protect its brand equity.
The brand report card helps you pinpoint your brand’s strengths and weaknesses so you can know where to focus your branding efforts.
After all, the stronger your brand, the more likely it is to attract ideal customers, command premium prices, and make your marketing and sales efforts more efficient.
The Brand Report Card
The following brand report card is a easy way to score your brand on 10 attributes shared by the world’s most effective brands.
Simply read and consider each of the questions below about your brand. For each question, score your response on the following scale. Keep track of your scores as you move through the report card.
After the final question, tally up your scores to find your brand’s grade.
Ready to get started? Let’s begin…
1. Do you have a well-defined brand compass?
A world-class brand starts with a well-defined brand compass. A summary of the most fundamental truths about your brand—including your purpose, vision, mission, and values—your brand compass articulates the direction your brand is headed and why.
A well-defined brand compass serves as the foundation for successful brand-building initiatives, ensuring consistent messaging and identity across all touchpoints. Its components represent a cross-section of the most profound truths about your brand.
A well-defined brand compass should include:
- Purpose: The reason your company exists beyond making a profit.
- Vision: The ideal world your brand hopes to bring about.
- Mission: What you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, whom you’re doing it for, and why you’re going to do it.
- Values: The principles on which your company culture is founded.
- Objectives: The tangible business goals you plan to achieve. They ground the loftier and more abstract language of your purpose, vision, and mission.
2. Do you know your target audience?
Next up on the brand report card is an assessment of how well you know your target audience. Like, really know them.
Who are they? What are their challenges? Why do they buy from your company?
Time and again, we work with companies who are convinced they know their customers. It often turns out that, in fact, what they assumed about their customers was woefully misinformed.
And that, to put it mildly, is a problem.
If you don’t understand the specific needs of your customers, then your brand will always be suboptimal. You will forever be missing a valuable opportunity to connect with those you serve in a genuine and powerful way.
Understanding your customers starts with brand research, specifically one-on-one customer interviews.
Do you know the following information for your target audience segments?
- Age
- Interests
- Education Level
- Location
- Job Title
- Income Level
- Company Size
- Favorite Websites
- Top Goals
- Greatest Challenges
- Buying Motivation
3. Is your brand differentiated from the competition?
The strongest brands occupy distinct niches in their customers’ minds. They are differentiated from the competition in clearly identifiable ways.
One of the best ways to differentiate your brand is with a unique and ownable brand personality.
Brand personality is the unique spectrum of thoughts, emotions, and behavioral patterns that are intrinsic to a brand. Its personality includes a brand’s most individualistic traits. It is what makes Apple the chic, minimalist auteur, or REI the rugged, pioneering outdoorsman.
A brand’s personality is the reason it is identifiable to its customers and the basis for the highly personal relationships they form with it.
A brand that is well differentiated from its competition has a personality that is:
- Human: It speaks to its audience in a natural, identifiable voice.
- Engaging: It relates important information in an interesting, compelling fashion.
- Recognizable: It is distinguished from other voices and identifiable in its uniqueness.
- Authentic: It is born from a brand’s purpose and values.
- Cohesive: It exists throughout a unified brand narrative.
- Consistent: It is the same personality regardless of touchpoint.
4. Do your employees understand your brand?
It’s essential that your employees understand what your brand stands for and what is expected of them as brand ambassadors.
When your employees don’t understand your core values, brand positioning, or brand promise, it translates into a confusing brand experience for your customers. Your employees are literally the face of your brand, after all.
All too often, executives underestimate how much the effectiveness of a brand’s strategy depends on internal brand alignment. The good news is, because so many brands are misaligned, internal brand alignment represents a huge opportunity for competitive differentiation.
For this brand report card element, go ask the following 5 questions to any (or all) of your employees. Their answers will give you a barometer on how well they truly understand your brand:
- What is our organization’s purpose, mission, vision, and values?
- What is our brand promise?
- How would you describe our business in one sentence?
- Who is our target audience?
- How are we different from our competitors?
5. Is your brand relevant?
Too many brands think relevance means staying ahead of current trends. But nothing can cause you to lose brand focus more quickly than the relentless pursuit of trends.
Relevance is not the same as trendiness. A brand is relevant when it fulfills the needs of its target audience.
The minute your products or services no longer fulfill the needs of your customer is the minute your customer will start looking elsewhere. In mistaking trendiness for relevance, too many brands lose sight of who they serve and why.
By remaining focused on your target audience—that ideal customer with a distinct need for your unique product or service—you’ll always be relevant, and in the process outlast the ebb and flow of ephemeral trends.
When evaluating your brand’s relevance for the brand report card, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your brand relentlessly customer-centric? Everything you bring to market should be designed to meet the needs of your target audiences. This includes needs that customers might not yet be aware of.
- Is your brand focused on experience? Focusing on customers means focusing on brand experience. Every touchpoint counts.
- Do you remember what makes your brand different? Jumping on a bandwagon will always be only a short-term fix. You have to adapt in ways that play to your strengths and emphasize your brand’s differentiation.
- Are your decisions aligned with your purpose? Always ensure the paths you pursue are true to your brand. Inauthentic attempts at staying relevant never work.
6. Is your brand consistent?
When it comes to branding, consistency is key. Your messaging should be born out of purpose every time your customers hear it. Your target audience should feel engaged every time they interact with your brand.
You should be continually focused on the unique value proposition that makes you the best at what you do. And, of course, you should strive to deliver on your brand’s promise every chance you get.
The best way to ensure a consistently executed brand is with a clearly defined set of brand guidelines that everyone in your organization has access to.
Consistency breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds trust, and trust is where brand loyalty begins. Consistency has multiple dimensions occurring over multiple touchpoints. Each dimension should be faithfully repeated and recognizable across every touchpoint.
How does the consistency of your brand hold up when it comes to the following dimensions and touchpoints?
- Dimensions:
- Visual Identity
- Voice and Messaging
- Market Positioning
- Touchpoints:
- Website
- Collateral
- Social Media
7. Does your brand architecture make sense?
Brand architecture is the clearly defined configuration of products or services offered by a brand. Effective architecture brings a brand’s full range of offerings into focus.
A clear and intuitive brand architecture enables you to better cross-promote your services and, more importantly, define the way your customers perceive your brand.
Brand architecture includes an integrated system of names, symbols, colors, and visual vocabulary that caters directly to your customer’s thought process.
That’s why the best brand architecture is built on a solid foundation of research into customer awareness, preference, and experience.
Research allows you to understand how your brand performs across different demographics and geographic areas. Only with research can you be aware of how and why your customers are making decisions.
In evaluating your brand architecture for the brand report card, start by asking the following questions:
- Are your products and/or services arranged in a simple, intuitive way?
- Are customers aware of the complete breadth of your products and/or services?
- Do your products and/or services effectively cross-promote each other?
- Does your brand’s extended identity system, including naming conventions, colors, and symbol placement, align with your overarching brand strategy.
8. Is your marketing effective?
When your brand is cohesive and well-articulated, your marketing initiatives will be too. Branding encompasses the foundational elements of marketing: visual identity, key messaging, brand personality, and competitive advantage.
Thorough brand strategy, including customer research, allows you to develop targeted marketing campaigns that are highly relevant to your most valuable customer segments.
A bold identity makes every marketing touchpoint more engaging, and the guidelines that emerge from branding ensure the consistent execution of your brand.
By measuring the effectiveness of your marketing, then, you are by extension measuring the effectiveness of your brand. Any number of key performance indicators (KPIs) can give you an informed measurement of your marketing’s effectiveness.
The following are four of the most important marketing KPIs to consider for your brand report card score:
Cost Per Lead: Cost per Lead measures the cost-effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This metric focuses entirely on the leads generated by a campaign. Cost per lead does not factor in the relative quality of a lead, however.
Return on Investment: Return on Investment measures the sales revenue a campaign brings on every dollar spent. This is the best KPI to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns because it also measures the quality of leads these campaigns generate.
Customer Lifetime Value: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics to measure because it can predict the future success of your brand. There are different ways to calculate CLV, but a simple equation measures:
- Average Order Value: average amount of money a customer spends on every order. Average Order Value = Total Sales / Order Count
- Purchase Frequency: average number of orders placed by each customer. Purchase Frequency = Total Orders / Total Customers
- Customer Value: average monetary value that each customer brings to your business during a timeframe. Customer Value = Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency
Revenue Growth: At the end of the day, the best way to judge your marketing’s success is by measuring your growth in sales revenue.
9. Does your visual identity capture your brand’s essence?
Your brand’s visual identity is more than just its logo. It includes elements like color, photography, and typography. An effective identity should be a unified system inspired by one or more of your brand’s defining characteristics.
Our increasingly digital-only media landscape has empowered brand identities like never before. Your identity can now be multifaceted and dynamic—even incorporate movement or change as an ownable, differentiating aspect like colors or typeface.
At the end of the day, the most important thing is that your identity effectively captures the authentic essence of your brand.
Some essential elements to consider when evaluating your brand’s identity include:
- Logo: Is it a strong, contemporary mark that resonates with your brand’s audience?
- Color: Does your identity feature colors that best represent your brand’s personality?
- Photography: Does the imagery featured on your website and in your collateral capture the authentic spirit of your brand?
- Typography: Do the fonts and styling in your identity, website and collateral comprise a cohesive system consistent with your brand personality?
- Layout: Does the arrangement of information produce a balanced look and feel across creative solutions?
10. Is your brand well-maintained?
Even the strongest brands require vigilant maintenance and ongoing brand management. You should never grow complacent or rest on your laurels when it comes to moving your brand forward.
A brand, after all, is a living, dynamic entity that requires continual maintenance to survive. This is achieved with ongoing customer research and regularly scheduled brand audits.
A brand audit is a detailed analysis of the current state of your brand and its position in the marketplace. This analysis is designed to give you an understanding of what’s currently going right with your brand. And, more importantly, what’s going wrong.
With this understanding in hand, you can create an action plan to address your brand’s critical issues.
The following are a few signs that you’ve been slipping on brand maintenance:
- You find yourself reading your latest blog posts, email blasts, or social media content and wondering if what you’re saying even makes sense anymore.
- You feel like you’ve moved too far away from what your business was about when you started.
- Your business has evolved since your last rebrand, and your visual and verbal messaging is no longer relevant.
- You continue to add to an expanding list of products and/or services.
- Your website traffic continues to grow but you aren’t converting that traffic into sales.
Grading Your Brand
Now for the most important part of the brand report card: tallying your score. Add up your scores from each question and compare your total score to the chart below:
The Takeaway
So, how did you do? If you’re feeling like the student who’s terrified to show his report card to his parents, don’t panic. The fact is, most brands don’t make the grade on many of these attributes. The good news is, none of them are difficult to correct.
It just takes a little time and effort, as well as commitment on behalf of decision-makers. It’s important that leadership understand the value of your company’s brand if you hope to fundamentally improve its performance.
Brian Lischer
A prolific blogger, speaker, and columnist, Brian has two decades of experience in design and branding. He’s written for publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, HuffPost, and Brand Quarterly.
