2024: if you work on brand or reputation, time to embrace data
Is it possible to prove, with hard #data, the impact of #corporatecommunication and brand on the business? Yes. If you embrace a data-driven culture.
2024 is a great year to start working on that (read on).
Where are we today? One of the main obstacles for communication and brand professionals today is to prove that they are an investment and not a cost.
According to Stephen Waddington, it's one of the main requests from C-level and board level: show me proof.
There is opportunity in the fact that business functions like HR, operations, sales and finance are more data-driven than the brand and reputation teams
The communication profession is lagging behind other functions - accounting and finance (obviously), sales, operations but even HR is increasingly quantified.
The good thing is that this is an opportunity for the communication function! Because #reputation and/or #brand are drivers for all these functions.
If other business functions already have the data, we can connect reputational and brand data to their data and show to what extent reputation and brand are driving results of those functions.
Because we can show actual, tangible impact on individual business functions Connecting it to top and bottom line will show exactly how much each percentage point of reputation increase boosts the top and bottom line.
Here's a few things we know from research:
? HR: a strong reputation makes it easier to attract better talent. Relevant metrics:
? Finance: brand or reputation function like a line of credit at the bank. Relevant metrics:
? Financial performance: firms with better reputation show consistently better performance. Relevant metrics:
? Marketing and sales: this is self-evident. Relevant metrics:
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What will it take? A data culture inside the communication and marketing function.
Start tracking all relevant metrics and plug them into the data warehouse of the business (or set up your own):
?? output of your team
?? the outcomes
Once you have a reliable way of tracking your activity and your outcomes, you can build an econometric model that shows how the ebb and flow of your brand impact the ebb and flow of your other business functions.
Is it easy? No.
Data is still siloed inside organizations. Some data will be in Excel files, some of it will reside in Powerpoint presentations, other data will be in an ERP system. Not everyone will be eager to share "their" data with you. Getting access to the data and connecting it to your own team's will not be a walk in the park.
Will it become easier? Yes. In 2024 and beyond, we expect data warehousing to become easier and data siloes will be connected to each other.
With generative AI, data analysis and data science will become "chat-driven", meaning you will be able to ask a chatbot any question you would like to know about your business' data.
You will be able to show the contribution of individual campaigns (answering the question: "how good was the creative concept") but also more generally - how much does a good reputation bring us in $$, or how much does it cost us?
Talking to C-level about reputation and brand, you will not need to rely on academic or anecdotal examples and cases, but instead you will be able to show impact on your own business using your own data.
But all of this requires you to start logging and tracking your efforts in a data-savvy way. That is an excellent resolution for 2024.
Director, Board and CEO level Communication advisor, University lecturer, (he/him), Co-founder Dublin Conversations
1 年Hiding in plain sight - totally agree
Professional advisor and researcher supporting agencies and in-house teams across a range of management, corporate communications and public relations issues
1 年Recommend connecting with James Crawford FPRCA in the U.K. We’ve had a similar conversation. He’s also a doer and builder