On 26th February in London the MRS ran a one day conference,‘Prescription for Success’. Jon Chandler and Mike Owen were both involved in presentations. This month we take a look at the presentation on “Brand Equity Measurement” given by Jon Chandler and Amber Gibson of Sanofi Aventis.
Jon Chandler 
18 Mar, 2008
Prescription for Success
At
the MRS ‘Prescription for Success’ conference, Jon Chandler [BHI]
and Amber Gibson [Sanofi Aventis] talked about Brand Equity Measurement. Here
they re-present some key themes.
Brand Equity and its measurement are key areas that we need to address in order to successfully guide the development of brands over time. So what is brand equity?
Ultimately, brand equity is about understanding and measuring value:
Talking about measuring and tracking brand equity is important because brands change and sustain the way people behave:
If we look at definitions of brands, these immediately flag some areas that we may need to examine if we want to measure and track brand equity:
- How well or how much is our brand recognised vs. others
- What is attached to our brand vs. others:
- Beliefs
- Performance perceptions
- Values and imagery
- Attributes
If we look at different brand functions or what brands do, this also flags areas may want or need to measure:
- how are people behaving and how do perceptions relate to this
- how are perceptions distributed amongst different people and how do these cluster
- how is our brand set apart from others
- what makes up our brand and how is it put together
- how well does our brand address peoples’ needs versus other brands
In talking about brands, we start thinking about values, emotions and so on. Sooner or later this raises the question of whether healthcare professionals are entirely rational decision makers or not.
Billions of dollars have been invested in neuroscientific research over the last 20 years and have demonstrated that:
- Human decision making is simultaneously rational and emotional
- Emotional components in decision making are ultimately stronger drivers because these determine goals and set agendas.
The fundamental purpose of Brand Equity Measurement is to understand how well we are doing and how well we will do in the future.
In doing brand equity we need, first of all, to ask who is it relevant to include?
We need to identify current usage, awareness and so on of our brand vs. key competitors.
We need to identify how firmly or not customers are attached to the brand vs. key competitors.
We need to understand our brand ‘means’ in contrast with competitors.
This element of determining associations around brands is fundamentally important and needs to be tailored to the therapy area.
Finally we need to look into the brand future.
So what do we do with brand equity? We need to:
- Set targets i.e. where are we now with our brand equity and where do we want to be
- Track it over time to see how it is changing and what is influencing change
- Reward it potentially through sales and marketing performance management
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