How to Read Brand Assessment Results—Management Issues to Examine Before the Overall Score

After completing a brand assessment, looking only at the overall score and deciding that “a high score means there is no problem” or “a low score means we need to rebuild everything” can easily lead to the wrong next steps.

The bottom line is that assessment results are not a report card that ranks companies, but a starting point for developing business hypotheses. Before looking at the overall score, examine inconsistencies between questions and where they affect revenue, profit, sales, recruitment, or the organization.

First, Check What Was Assessed, by Whom, and When

The same score can mean different things. Did only the business leader respond, or did sales managers and frontline employees also participate? Was the assessment about the current business or its future vision? Were new product launches or organizational changes underway when the responses were submitted? Without confirming the scope and timing, you cannot compare the numbers.

Start by recording these four points.

1. Respondents and their roles
2. Businesses, products, and regions assessed
3. Date of response
4. Evidence supporting the response to each question

If the evidence is simply “that is how I feel,” it is a hypothesis. It needs to be checked against customer interviews, reasons for lost deals, gross profit margins, repeat purchases, reasons candidates declined job offers, employee activity records, and other evidence.

Look for Weak Connections Rather Than Focusing on the Overall Score

For example, even if the business leader can clearly explain the brand promise, if it is not reflected in the reasons given for choosing the company in sales proposals, the problem lies in implementation rather than a lack of guiding principles. Conversely, even if customers hold the company in reasonably high regard, a lack of shared decision-making criteria internally may make that performance difficult to reproduce when staff change or the business expands.

Examine the following connections.

• Are management strategy and the choice of customers and markets connected?
• Is the promise to customers connected to products, sales, and operations?
• Are external communications connected to employees’ daily decisions?
• Are actions connected to the metrics used to evaluate them?

HUV DESIGN OFFICE’s free BRAND CHECK™ is designed to examine these relationships through 12 questions covering brand foundations, strategy design, and implementation and adoption. However, the results alone do not establish the causes.

Five Steps to Select One Management Issue to Address Next

1. Choose the Area with the Greatest Business Impact, Not the Lowest Score

Some low-scoring items have little effect on current business performance. On the other hand, if inconsistent promises made by sales teams are directly leading to discounts or lost deals, addressing that issue becomes a high priority.

2. Turn It into a Question That Can Be Disproved

“Our brand is weak” cannot be tested. Turn it into a verifiable question, such as “Can our sales representatives explain in the same words why our priority customers choose us?”

3. Check Against Existing Data

Review proposals, sales meeting records, customer feedback, inquiries, gross profit, reasons for cancellation, recruitment interview records, and other relevant data. If no data is available, decide how and over what period to collect it.

4. Test One Change

Test a single change closely related to the cause, such as the definition of target customers, the opening explanation in a proposal, approval criteria, or questions asked of customers. Changing the logo and website all at once is not always the right first step.

5. Set a Review Date and Decision Criteria

Before taking action, decide what needs to change, and how, for you to continue. For metric design, see Designing Branding KPIs; for how to address the topic in management meetings, see Four Questions to Make Brand Strategy Work in Management Meetings.

The Limits of Assessment Results

Self-reported assessments are subject to differences in respondents’ perceptions and overly optimistic judgments. If no customer research has been conducted, they cannot substitute for customer evaluations. Nor can short-term changes in scores alone prove the effectiveness of an initiative.

The public summary of ISO 20671-1:2021 describes brand evaluation as an integrated framework that includes input elements, output dimensions, and indicators, and explains that it can be used for internal and external evaluation. This offers a useful reference for considering why multiple elements need to be examined together, rather than relying on a single overall score. However, the public summary does not certify the validity of HUV’s assessment scores or the process presented here.

Conclusion

What matters in a brand assessment is not raising the score. It is identifying where the connection breaks between management strategy, the promise to customers, frontline execution, and measurement of results, and selecting one issue that can be tested. Use the assessment as a starting point to cross-check business data against facts from the front line.

If you would like to translate brand issues into business decision-making criteria, explore HUV DESIGN OFFICE’s services.

References

• ISO, “ISO 20671-1:2021 Brand evaluation — Part 1: Principles and fundamentals” (public summary, published November 2021)
  https://www.iso.org/standard/81739.html

Author: Daisuke Irikura (Representative Director, HUV DESIGN OFFICE Co., Ltd.)