Measuring brand equity at the local level

Inherently, we all know what brand equity is, even if we don’t know its exact definition. Simply put, it’s the loyalty, the recognition, and the feelings that a brand evokes when you see it or interact with it. Whether it’s Nike or Dunkin Donuts, big brands tend to have strong brand equity, having built a base of loyal customers and worldwide recognition that delivers revenue and repeat customers. For multi-location companies, understanding brand equity at the local and national level is important, especially for furthering brand development. Individual locations have significant opportunities to forge deeper connections with a brand’s audience, can offer unique insights into what resonates, and help the brand grow awareness on a broader scale. While somewhat more effort than other metrics, there are structured ways to measure brand equity at the local level and deliver best practices to all locations.

What is brand equity?

Brand equity comprises multiple components, making it a reliable indicator of the strength of a brand. It is a value-driven metric that seeks to give a broad indication of where your brand stands in the market, in comparison to others in your industry, and to your customers. Under the brand equity umbrella are brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand associations, and the total value of the brand, each measured uniquely. Ideally, growing and enhancing brand equity should be an integral part of any brand’s overall marketing strategy.

Strong brand equity means your customers recognize your brand’s value, feel loyalty towards it, are willing to pay a premium for your products or services, make repeat purchases, and serve as brand ambassadors. Strong equity can improve revenue, drive expansion, and deliver consistent results over a long period of time. On the converse, poor brand equity can be due to consistent negative reviews, service or product recalls, poor customer service, inability to resonate with an audience, inauthenticity, association with disasters or disastrous figures, and many other things. For multi-location brands, brand equity at the broader level and at the local level may be very different, making it vital to track both and understand how and why they may differ.

How is local brand equity measured?

Measuring brand equity can seem time consuming, and that’s because it is, and it generally requires digging deeper than pulling together digital campaign results. However, knowing how to measure brand equity, and where it stands, is vital to scale. Broadly speaking, there is a brand equity index that provides one simple score for your brand, and can be useful for setting a baseline. Measuring brand equity at a high level and at the local level will require a lot of the same lift, however, the local level may be somewhat easier due to the connected nature of your brand with the local community. If the brand is not connected with the local community, that’s probably a good indicator that local brand equity is not very high. By measuring brand equity, you are essentially performing a brand strengths analysis that will provide valuable information to drive further marketing strategies.

To get started measuring brand equity, take a look at your brand awareness strategy and map out local audience awareness. For instance, have employees and the leadership team respond to the following questions to determine local awareness:

Do the friends and family of staff know the brand? How well?
Does the location receive requests for partnerships, sponsorships, participation, and more for local community organizations or events?
When you ask customers how they found out about you, what’s their response?
How many new customers do you get from local referrals?
Is there consistent foot traffic?

Another component of local brand equity is customer sentiment, which is somewhat easier to gauge when you have a store front or clinic where customers interact with staff. However, it can also be presumed through digital channels. Here are some basic questions to get a grasp on customer sentiment:

Are customers generally excited to visit?
Are they delighted with the service or product received?
Do they have constructive feedback?
Does the location receive the same complaints repeatedly?

Responding to a variety of questions will help determine where customer sentiment stands now and gives you a benchmark for continued monitoring. Beyond these questions, you can use customer reviews from Facebook, Google, Yelp, and more to determine overall sentiment at any given time.

Community engagement, while somewhat related to the other two, focuses on how well your local brand engages with the community. Does the location attend local events such as community fairs, workshops, or sporting events? Do they sponsor or partner with local organizations or teams? Do they host events or gatherings? Ideally this number should be increasing each year as the organization becomes more known in the community.

Finally, we look at total value of the brand to deliver a complete picture of brand equity or in broader terms, marketing equity. Total value of the brand highlights relevance, awareness, and standing in the brand’s industry. Take a minute to tally up where your brand stands in comparison to your competitors, how well known you are in the market, and the monetary value of your brand or location. When considering brand equity vs brand value, it’s important to note that brand value is one component of brand equity and focuses on the monetary value of the brand. .

Tools and processes for tracking brand equity at the local level

Some of the most effective tools at your disposal for measuring the different components of brand equity include:

Surveys – Asking customers to respond to surveys gives them an opportunity to deliver timely feedback and provides qualitative data that can be hard to gather otherwise. Surverys can be repeated at different times to compare against the benchmark, or after specific events with different questions.
Google business profile reviews – Reviews serve as a window into an audience’s feelings about a location. Since each location must have their own google business profile, the reviews will be specific to that exact location, making it even more clear what the local audience thinks. Obviously, brands can look at reviews on other social or industry-specific platforms as well.
Social media monitoring – Social monitoring is the process of paying attention to social media to see how often people talk about, follow, and engage with your brand. There are a number of tools you can use to investigate your brand, and each location.
First-party data from CRM or engagements – Most likely you have a CRM collecting valuable data about your audience that can be used to gauge interest, sentiment, and loyalty. This can also come from events, such as fairs or trade shows, that each location attends. After each event, teams can work on building a record of people they met or reengaged.
Reengagement or loyalty metrics – Loyalty programs and reengagement metrics are useful indicators of customer sentiment. If the brand’s loyalty program is shrinking or customers are not returning, it’s a good indicator that brand equity is suffering.

Bringing it all together

None of this means anything if you don’t have a strategy for tracking and monitoring results and using that information to achieve ambitious brand equity KPIs or goals overall. You will also need a robust dashboard or other system for collecting all the data, including qualitative and quantitative metrics coming from different sources. Ideally, each location gets access to the dashboard and the metrics for other locations, sparking productive conversations (and some healthy competition).

If you’re interested in growing brand equity, reach out to the MDG team today.