Brand Performance: Key Attributes & Benefits

The product itself is at the heart of brand equity because it is the primary influence on what consumers experience with a brand, what they hear about a brand from others, and what the firm can tell customers about the brand in their communications.

Designing and delivering a product that fully satisfies consumer needs and wants is a prerequisite for successful marketing, regardless of whether the product is a tangible good, service, organization, or person.

To create brand loyalty and resonance, marketers must ensure that consumers’ experiences with the product at least meet, if not actually surpass, their expectations.

Numerous studies have shown that high-quality brands tend to perform better financially and yield higher returns on investment.

Brand performance describes how well the product or service meets customers’ more functional needs. How well does the brand rate objective assessments of quality? To what extent does the brand satisfy utilitarian, aesthetic, and economic customer needs and wants in the product or service category?

The brand performance transcends the product’s ingredients and features to include dimensions that differentiate the brand. Often, the strongest brand positioning relies on performance advantages of some kind, and it is rare that a brand can overcome severe performance deficiencies.

Five important types of attributes and benefits often underlie brand performance, as follows:

1. Primary ingredients and supplementary features

Customers often have beliefs about the levels at which the primary ingredients of the product operate (low, medium, high, or very high), and about special, perhaps even patented, features or secondary elements that complement these primary ingredients. Some attributes are essential ingredients necessary for a product to work, whereas others are supplementary features that allow for customization and more versatile, personalized usage. Of course, these vary by product or service category.

2. Product reliability, durability, and serviceability

Reliability measures the consistency of performance over time and from purchase to purchase. Durability is the expected economic life of the product, and serviceability is the ease of repairing the product if needed. Thus, perceptions of product performance are affected by factors such as speed, accuracy, and care of product delivery and installation; promptness, courtesy, and helpfulness of customer service and training; and the quality of repair service and the time involved.

3. Service effectiveness, efficiency, and empathy

Customers often have performance-related associations with service. Service effectiveness measures how well the brand satisfies customers’ service requirements. Service efficiency describes the speed and responsiveness of service. Finally, service empathy is the extent to which service providers are seen as trusting, caring, and having the customer’s interests in mind.

4. Style and design

The design has a functional aspect in terms of how a product works that affect performance associations. Consumers also may have associations with the product that goes beyond its functional aspects to more aesthetic considerations such as its size, shape, materials, and color involved. Thus, performance may also depend on sensory aspects such as how a product looks and feels, and perhaps even what it sounds or smells like.

5. Price

The pricing policy for the brand can create associations in consumers’ minds about how relatively expensive (or inexpensive) the brand is, and whether it is frequently or substantially discounted. Price is a particularly important performance association because consumers may organize their product category knowledge in terms of the price tiers of different brands.

CASE STUDY: SUBWAY

Subway has zoomed to the top as the biggest-selling quick-serve restaurant through a clever positioning of offering healthy, good-tasting sandwiches. One of Subway’s highly successful product launches was the $5 footlong sandwich.

Dreamed up by a franchise operator in Miami, the idea quickly took hold and was the perfect solution for hungry, cash-starved consumers during the recession. This strong performance and value message has allowed Subway to significantly expand its market coverage and potential customer base.

CONCLUSION

Measuring and improving your brand performance not only improves the overall strategy but builds brand equity. In a growing and increasingly competitive landscape in order to stand out, you need the right insights and industry understanding to gain the upper hand on your competitors.

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