Branding for the Public Sector: Creating, Building and Managing Brands People Will Value

Chapter 9 Tracking Brand Success

The complexity and challenges faced are many in the implementation and management of a brand strategy. Brands are strategic assets of tremendous financial value, especially to nations and the public sector, and brand ambassadors, brand managers or brand custodians of any kind are really asset managers. With this in mind, brand management is not complete unless there is some form of tracking of the success of the brand, and this can be done in a variety of ways, all of which require some kind of market research.

The private sector has now become much more concerned with the total value of their brands, not just with profitability, and the public sector is following suit. The valuation of brands is by no means an exact science, but the sale of brands for prices far in excess of their asset valuation has meant that brand valuation has become a business in its own right. For the brand manager, this means that several measures of performance have to be taken into account simultaneously. Most research companies that evaluate brand health and performance have proprietary instruments for measuring brand equity and value, and the two concepts are different.

For instance, brand equity measurement can include a whole host of variables, which in the commercial world includes brand awareness, brand associations, brand trust and loyalty, perceived quality, price, market share and cash-flow premiums, internationality, support, protection, and many others. ...