BrandAsset® Valuator
To profitably manage their brands, companies need as much intelligence as possible about their brands' performance and potential. A company's brands are its first line of communication with target audiences and can carry enormous weight. The power of the brand is often the deciding factor in a consumer's decision to purchase a product or service.
Determining the power of a brand and its strengths and weaknesses can be difficult, however—especially without a framework for understanding what is important. An invaluable tool for assessing brand health is BrandAsset®Valuator (BAV), Young & Rubicam Brands' proprietary resource for building and managing brands. BAV is the most extensive worldwide study of brands ever undertaken. First fielded in 1993, it is the first global consumer study to provide an empirically derived model of the way in which brands gain and lose strength. The BAV studies have created an enormous database of brand perceptions, composed of data from more than 540,000 consumers, from 48 countries, on more than 38,000 brands. From this vast resource, Young & Rubicam Brands has mined a wealth of knowledge about how brands are built, how they develop, gain strength, and either enjoy continued health or face erosion.
The Four Pillars and the Power Grid
To diagnose a brand's health, four primary dimensions and their relationships are examined: Differentiation, Relevance, Esteem, and Knowledge. Differentiation, the brand's perceived distinctiveness, is the heart of the brand, its core force. It sets the brand apart from competitors, allows the brand to command premium prices, and serves as the leading indicator of both brand vitality and brand decline. Relevance is heavily correlated with household penetration; reflecting product, pricing, promotion, packaging, and placement. Esteem, or regard for a brand, reflects its popularity and perceptions of its quality. Finally, Knowledge is the result of successful Relevant Differentiation and the achievement of high Esteem.
The relationship among these four pillars yields compelling information regarding a brand's capacity to carry a premium price and fend off competition. Managing this relationship is the key to brand health. Young and Rubicam Brands plots brands on the Power Grid, which shows the brand compared to competitors and others on the key dimensions of brand strength and stature.
BrandAsset®Valuator can be used to gain a range of knowledge about a brand:
- Identify problem areas, barriers, and "hot buttons"
- Analyze competitive strengths and weaknesses
- Image/attribute/brand personality strengths and weaknesses
- Identify key perception drivers for the category
- Track brand movement over time on critical dimensions
- Constituency analyses to identify potential target groups
- Investigation of a corporate name as a potential parent/umbrella brand
- Determination of marketing needs and possible common communications/programs
- Identification of potential alliance partners