Brand health: Key metrics, methods, and why it matters

How healthy is your brand?

Brand health represents a brand's overall strength and impact as perceived by its target audience. It serves as a crucial indicator of a brand's current market position and its potential for future growth.

An even better question: Do you track your brand health?

By continuously tracking brand health, you can gain insights into how your brand is performing against competitors, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to build a stronger, more resilient brand.

This article will guide you through the key metrics, essential methods, and the significance of tracking brand health. Keep reading to learn how to track your brand to improve customer perceptions and grow your market share.

Brand health is an overall assessment of how well your brand is performing and its vitality. It encompasses how consumers perceive, interact with, and feel about a brand. A healthy brand is one that is recognized, trusted, and has a strong, positive connection with its audience. It goes beyond simple sales figures to measure a brand's long-term equity and value.

Tracking brand health is essential for any business aiming for long-term success. It helps you move from making reactive decisions to implementing proactive strategies grounded in solid data.

Without a shadow of a doubt, brand health metrics are an important part of business strategy. That’s because today’s consumers are overwhelmed with choice. Regardless of the industry you’re competing in, to drive sales, you’ll need to measure brand health metrics, act on opportunities, and fend off all of the other rivals vying for the attention of your target audience. 

Measuring brand health requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. Here is a brief look at some of the most important metrics you can track.

A healthy brand is one that is known by consumers. So, an important aspect of the branding process involves communicating the brand to the market, and then gathering data from the market to ensure that your messages have landed.

Brand awareness measures the extent to which consumers are familiar with your brand. It can be measured using our Brand Awareness Survey Template, which asks about brand recognition or recall.

One of the biggest contributors to your brand's success and health is customer loyalty. Why? According to estimates, it costs about 5 times as much to acquire a new customer as to retain an existing one.

Brand loyalty is the percentage of customers who make repeat purchases from your brand over time. It can be measured by tracking repeat purchases or by loyalty-specific questions in surveys, such as our NPS and Brand Loyalty Survey Template.

Related reading: Key metrics to measure brand loyalty

NPS measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking a single question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

The score categorizes customers as promoters, passives, or detractors.

Related reading: Calculate your Net Promoter Score

Share-of-voice used to be used to describe the share of your advertising (e.g. TV, print and radio) compared to all your competitors shares. Today, the concept has evolved to include a number of different measures of awareness of your brand.

SOV measures your brand's presence in the market compared to your competitors. It can be calculated by comparing the number of mentions, ad impressions, or search volume for your brand versus key competitors.

Capturing your audience’s voice is vital in learning about your digital presence.

Purchase intent is simply the intention of customers to purchase your products or services within a specific timeframe, such as within the next 12 months. When combined with measuring brand consideration, you’ll have a very powerful measure of the health of your brand.

Another key dimension of overall brand health is the reputation of your brand.

Brand reputation is the collective opinion of consumers about your brand. It is built over time and encompasses everything from product quality and customer service to social and environmental responsibility.

Brand reputation can be negative, positive or somewhere in between. However, once you’ve established a baseline of your brand reputation, you’ll need to continually monitor it for changes.

This involves analyzing text from social media, reviews, and forums to determine the overall tone (positive, negative, or neutral) toward your brand. It helps you understand the emotions behind the data.

Businesses with strong, positive brand equity can attract loyal customers and attract new ones.

Brand equity, or the perceived value of your brand in customers' minds, can be measured by metrics such as brand image, perceived quality, and brand loyalty, which indicate the premium customers are willing to pay for your products.

To collect the data needed for the metrics above, you need to use a variety of research methods. A multi-pronged approach provides the most comprehensive view of your brand's health. Some strategies that you should consider for measuring brand reputation include:

You can use surveys to measure brand awareness, loyalty, and purchase intent by asking targeted questions. Regularly surveying your customer base can alert you to changes in your reputation, so that you can act swiftly and accordingly.

And don’t forget that reputation is also relative. Not only do you want to know if you have a positive reputation, but you also want to know how it compares to those of competitors.

Tools like SurveyMonkey make it easy to create and distribute these surveys.

Monitoring social media platforms will help you to find out who is talking about your brand and what they’re saying. Combined with sentiment analysis, which evaluates whether conversations about your brand are positive or negative, you’ll have a strong insight into your digital reputation. We have some tips here on platforms you can use for monitoring social media channels.

Customers love reviewing their experiences with brands, and in the digital age, there are plenty of opportunities for them to do so. Reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and your own website are a direct source of feedback. Analyzing this feedback helps you gauge customer satisfaction and identify specific issues or opportunities related to your products and services.

For in-depth, qualitative insights, focus groups bring together a small number of people to discuss their perceptions of your brand. This method is excellent for understanding the "why" behind consumer opinions and uncovering nuanced insights.

For a more tailored approach, you can conduct custom research studies. This involves designing specific methodologies, such as A/B testing or brand lift studies, to answer unique questions about your brand and its performance.

Ultimately, a strong brand is one that is not only visible but also deeply connected to its audience.

By consistently tracking metrics like brand awareness, loyalty, and sentiment, you can proactively manage your brand's reputation and ensure it remains strong and resilient.

SurveyMonkey provides the tools and expertise to help you create, send, and analyze brand health surveys, making it simple to get the actionable insights you need to grow your brand. Get started today and gain a clearer picture of your brand's health.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.