It’s a dated notion that any marketing activity that generates awareness is good.
Well, it’s not.
Ask any Sales Director, Finance Director or board member. Brand Awareness just does not cut the mustard these days.
Our Brazil Labs team has developed a better way to quantify and qualify communications outputs and align them with business targets. This is what we are calling the Brand Understanding Index, or BUI.
First off, why Brand Understanding?
There are many essential components that any business needs to communicate. We have broken down the reasons why people make purchases into 15 components. These range from the obvious – what the business does, what it produces – through to the underbelly of a brand – its ESG and HR policies, its sustainability programmes, its suppliers, and a whole range of other criteria.
Each one of these are important for people to understand - so that customers, staff, suppliers and others have a full perception of a business. This gives us the basis for measurement which then can be aligned to business performance KPIs, such as sales, lead generation, and website visits.
Whether it be in new, mature, or highly-competitive marketplaces, Brand Understanding is what it takes to succeed. And the best and most valuable businesses in the world have built comprehensive Brand Understanding to not just distinguish themselves from others, but also to build genuine love and passion from the public.
How BUI works.
The BUI allows the PR industry to provide qualitative and quantitative measurements that actually justify marketing budgets. No more hiding behind relatively empty measurements such as coverage and mention volumes, brand sentiment, and even share of voice. We know many marketeers outside of the PR industry struggle with these measurements, let alone most CFOs.
While we plan on rolling out BUI for all of our campaigns, we are also making this measurement open to all - that way there are standards that the industry can work to and use to measure performance, not just volume.