When you first enter a market as a new company, it can often be the case that you don’t have the time, or resources to see how you’re fitting into the bigger picture. However, as time goes on and you become more established, it’s wise to know where you fit into this market. One way of doing this is by looking at a brand index. This is basically a list that ranks all the brands in a given category.
Firstly, it’s worth turning your attention to a brand index to simply see if your brand is in it or not. There are many different brand indexes for any number of categories. The reason for this is they all use different metrics to calculate a brand index, with each index giving different weightings to each metric. A few examples of these metrics are:
Net promoter score: This is when a score is worked out based on how much consumers say they would recommend a brand to friends or family. Word of mouth recommendations can be a hard thing to measure. So, this at least gives an estimate of how much a brand can rely on word of mouth.
Purchase intent: This metric measures how likely it is consumers will want to purchase or repurchase a specific brand.
Unprompted brand recall: This looks at how well-known brands are, rather than the quality of the brand itself. This is done by giving consumers a certain category, such as electronics, health and well-being, snacks, etc. Then getting consumers to name all the brands they associate with that category.
For different companies, there might be different metrics they’re interested in focusing on, depending on their market, ethos, targets, etc. If your brand is featuring on a brand index over and over again, it can be a great way to see public reaction to business decisions you’ve made.
If you’re a medium-sized business owner though, still nurturing your brand, there are still insights to be gained from a brand index. Unless you’re in a very niche market, it is unlikely that your brand will be appearing on the index itself. However, you can see which brands are appearing on an index, and how these shift over time. This allows detailed analysis to take place on what decision different companies have made for their brands and how that has affected their brand’s ranking.