How do consumer and industrial product brand consultants measure success?

When you hire a team of high-quality consumer and industrial product brand consultants, it’s important to be sure their efforts are producing concrete, positive results. You may see increased sales a few months after bringing the team on board, but how can you know that they’re the ones responsible? Maybe your sales team simply had a fruitful quarter, or there was a turnaround in the market.

If your consumer/industrial product brand consultants are worth their fees, they’ll have an infrastructure in place to measure not only your brand’s impact on the market, but the effectiveness of their own efforts. When you shop around for consumer/industrial product brand consultants, make sure to address this topic in your interviews.

(Full disclosure: Scott Yaw Associates provides some of the best branding strategies on the market, and can measure the success of your brand as well as ways to make it stronger. They’re among the best consumer/industrial product brand consultants in the industry.)

The truth is that there’s no magic eight-ball that can tell branding experts how well they’ve done their jobs. There will always be a certain amount of variables and “known unknowns” in the marketplace, and even the best consultants occasionally have to fly blind. But by employing a variety of evaluation techniques, branding experts can give themselves a reliable picture of how their work – and your brand – have impacted the consumer landscape.

What makes branding even more complicated is that a company’s brand doesn’t always have a direct correlation to consumer activity. You may know that Fender makes a high-quality guitar, but you may never purchase a Stratocaster in your life. Maybe you know that Will Smith is the biggest movie star in the world, but you haven’t had time to visit the cinema since the time you saw Annie Hall. On the other hand, you may associate McDonald’s with obesity, environmental degradation and waste, but that won’t stop you from going there if it’s your only choice on a long car trip.

So brand consultants wind up employing a variety of tools to gauge brand impact in the marketplace. Teresa Wegert of the ClickZ network suggests that “online surveys top most buyers’ must-have list of branding analysis tools,” but warns that their unpredictability creates a risk factor. On the Brand Strategy Insider blog, author Brad VanAuken suggests paying close attention to “top-of-mind unaided awareness,” or how likely potential consumers are to think of your brand first. And if your brand isn’t at the top of your consumer’s mind, where does it fall in the stack? And what is their emotional connection to the brand?

Whatever the metrics used, it’s important to remember one thing: Any brand metric is only as good as the action it enables you to take. If, at the end of the day, measuring the impact your brand has had on the market doesn’t allow you to make firm decisions about your marketing strategy, it’s not a useful tool. When consumer/industrial product brand consultants plan a branding strategy for you, make sure you’re able to work with them to implement that strategy in a way that will, ultimately, improve your bottom line.