How to make sure your brand stays healthy

Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing on steroids.

It's so easy to work out your cost per response or cost per acquisition.

Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) becomes the golden grail.

But in all this Performance Marketing are you sure you are also building a brand?

There seems to be a divide that is growing.

A belief that you need a separate budget to build a brand.

Whereas, we know that a great brand-building idea invariably helps make direct marketing even more efficient. It cuts through clutter.

It pains me to see so much Performance Marketing ignoring the long-term for short-term transactional results.

What if there was a metric that measured sales as well as brand health?

There is the Net Promoter Score.

The only problem with the Net Promoter Score is that it is an indication of the intention of recommendation. It is not based on an actual lead or a sale.

What if you could have a metric that tells you how much people love your brand in a way that actually results in sales? Or qualified leads?

As it happens, there is one.

I call it the Prosumer Quotient.

First, I may have to clarify that a prosumer means a person who recommends a brand without expecting to be paid to do so.

Not to be confused with an 'Influencer' who expects to be paid.

Also, all prosumers don't have to be your customers. They love the brand even if they are not using the brand themselves. They readily recommend it.

But by and large, it is your loyal customers who will become your best prosumers.

What's the metric?

If you want to know how healthy your brand is then all you need to know is whether your sales are steadily growing, how many are repeat customers, and how many customers became customers because of a recommendation.

Here's a way that you can measure how well word-of-mouth is working for your brand.

All you have to agree to do is to thank the people who got you the sale.

Thank the customer (C) who gave you the sale. Especially if that customer is a repeat customer (R). And thank the prosumer who recommended that sale (P).

Finding out who the Prosumer might be is quite easy.

'Welcome to our brand family. Did anyone recommend our brand to you? If so, we'd like to send you both a token of our appreciation for being part of our family.'

You just have to want to thank people who are now part of your brand tribe. Show them that you would like to have a long-term relationship

Calculating the Prosumer Quotient now becomes easy.

2 (R) + 3 (P) / C

If this figure is greater than 1, your brand will grow exponentially. And if this figure is approaching 10, you will have people wanting to fund your brand.

Not because you have a high number of transient customers.

But because you have a brand that attracts loyal customers.

It's a great way to measure the word-of-mouth power of your brand.

By the way, if you did not know already, word-of-mouth is by far the world's most powerful medium. Now you have a method to measure its impact.

It's not Advertising vs Word-of-Mouth, it is Advertising x Word-of-Mouth that matters in the long run.

Let me know if you have any questions.