A brand index is a list of different brands within a certain market. This list is ranked based on several different factors. What’s important to remember is that not all brand indexes are universal. Specifically, the factors considered to compile a brand index can differ massively from one index to the next. So, in this article, we’re going to look at some different factors that are considered within different brand indexes. These aren’t necessarily specific to every single brand index, but instead some more common metrics used by some of the more trusted brand indexes.
The first metric we’ll be looking at is the net promoter score. As you can probably guess from the name, this looks at how likely a consumer is likely to promote your brand. Or to be more specific, how likely it is that a consumer is going to recommend your brand to friends or family. This is a good insight to measure, as word of mouth recommendations are very hard for a company to collate. So, it’s important to have an idea of the likelihood of this word of mouth recommendation happening.
Another key metric nearly all brand indexes use is purchase intent. This is pretty self-explanatory, it shows how likely a customer would purchase from your brand. This manages to focus on a different area of the consumer’s psyche, as net promoter score is showing an external response to your product, while purchase intent is a lot more internal, and something of a personal decision.
These last two brand metrics will tell you relatively the same thing. As it will often be the case that if someone is willing to recommend a brand, they’re willing to buy it themselves and vice versa. The differences are small but important overall. However, a different metric is needed to tell a different side of how a brand is performing. This can be found in unprompted brand recall. This is where consumers are given a specific category and asked to name all the brands they can relate to that category. This tells us how well known a brand is, how well it’s marketed, and simply whether a brand is known to consumers or not. This information combined with the two other metrics is a way in which an accurate brand index can be produced. As it takes in personal consumer opinions, and also finds out what exactly consumers are aware of.