Kaizen, the Japanese management concept of continuous improvement, transformed the enterprise world. Over the years, companies across various industries embraced this philosophy to slash costs and boost productivity, through a relentless focus on eliminating waste. In many ways, the world of brand performance management today needs its own bespoke version of Kaizen.
With omni-channel fundamentally disrupting consumer and buyer behavior, businesses should figure out new ways to influence their target audience, and win and retain brand loyalty. From marketers’ point of view, this implies continuous brand assessment.
Be it product category, geography, consumer segment, engagement level, shopping channel and several other filters, marketers now have to deliver on-demand reports on brand performance. This dynamic reflects companies’ efforts to maximize Return on Investment (RoI) from their customer outreach programs, by measuring actual outcomes against pre-defined targets for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Realizing this ambition though remains a major challenge for brand managers. Data relating to key brand hygiene factors such as sales, consumption, distribution, penetration, loyalty and equity are typically collected in a disaggregated manner, and stored in disparate systems.
To add to marketers’ woes, many companies are yet to effectively integrate their multiple dashboards that track brand performance on different dimensions. This means there is no single snapshot view of brand hygiene and performance available.
On top of these two bottlenecks, companies have a long way to go when it comes to provisioning ‘omni-brand assessment’ data in real time, across various mobile devices. Marketers strive to ensure seamless interaction with the brand anytime, anywhere for their customers, and yet, themselves struggle to fetch relevant performance data on demand. The irony couldn’t be starker!
Integrated Data Analytics
What marketers require is a one-stop, integrated ‘smart’ data analytics tool that facilitates quick access to information on various facets of brand performance. All that users have to do is set targets across dynamic parameters for a specific brand, and the ‘omni-source’ solution should provision a consolidated view of brand hygiene and results.
Equally important, such a platform should enable sourcing and analysis of brand performance-related data across various time periods — quarterly, half-yearly, annual, or older time spans.
By persistently tracking and presenting multi-dimensional information on brand performance in a centralized location, ‘smart’ data analytical tools can allow marketers to swiftly identify areas of underperformance and outperformance.
Let’s look at an example here. Sales of a female apparel brand are declining as highlighted by the steady deterioration in conversion ratios of visitors to the company’s online and physical stores. In such a scenario, the brand manager faces challenges in collecting key facts, understanding the methodology of the data collection and metrics, unit conversions, aligning time of study, and charting and assessing multiple trends between both online and physical store metrics.
In this case, the brand manager could leverage the integrated ‘omni-source’ platform which optimizes time and integrates the information by flattening these challenges, thereby helping to determine a potential correlation between social media interactions and increasing customer churn. Based on these insights, the brand manager will then be able to design outreach campaigns targeted at specific buyer cohorts and optimize spends for higher RoI.
Brand performance analytics has to become truly ‘smart’ in a ‘smart’ universe, where cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility are set to become prevalent. Even as they design and implement intuitive buyer experience programs in an omni-channel world, consumer-centric companies should simultaneously empower their marketing function with integrated insights into brand performance.
This is vital, as omni-brand assessment will be a source of competitive advantage going forward. The ability to equip brand managers with real-time access to relevant data will separate the leaders from the laggards, as far as business agility and responsiveness is concerned. The time to act is right now!
Click here to know more about WNS Brandttitude™, our next-gen business intelligence self-serve analytics platform, that can track business performance.