Brand power is a crucial element in all strategic marketing discussions about brands. The key ideas here relate to many aspects of brands and branding but in this article we would start talking about brand power. Overall, brand power can be deemed as a dimension of a company’s strategic analysis. There are several ways to look at this dimension.
Brand value
In general, the idea is to try and evaluate the amount of money that some brands cost. The usual approach estimates the price that a company would need to pay if it wanted to buy and use this particular brand in everyday operations. There are several other approaches to calculating the price of the brand, so there exist many rankings rating brands in terms of this price that can be paid on the market (see an example here).
Customer awareness
Measuring the knowing of the brand or their favorable attitude towards it is key for many marketing strategies. Basically, it is the share of customers that are aware of the existence of this brand or find this particular brand appealing. Usually, pollsters get a representative group or a representative sample and ask them several questions. There are two types of questions:
- with the hint a list of brands is offered to look at and the customer just ranks them in the order from the most familiar or most favorite to the least familiar or least favorite;
- without a hint the customer has to name and rank the brands without any data or advice from the pollster – just from the top of his head or her head.
Number of customers
The third crucial element of the brand power dimension is the number of customers who buy and use this brand. Besides the actual customer count, there exist additional aspects of segmenting the total number of customers. Typically, these include geographical, gender, age, etc. distributions of people using products or services of this brand. Understanding these helps evaluate brand power in more detail.
In conclusion, brand power is a crucial marketing concept. It is somewhat hard to grasp and evaluate. However, there are some useful metrics introduced to measure the power of the brand.
