A strong brand is a strategic advantage. In good times it helps you grow faster, and during times of uncertainty and change it’s a powerful anchor. A strong brand means you have increased audience confidence, greater credibility among public and private stakeholders, and a foundation to make challenging and innovative decisions. Your brand isn't just about visibility—it’s about credibility and building trust over time.
A critical aspect of a strong brand is understanding your brand equity—evaluating your audiences’ thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about your brand measured in five core components. When we use social intelligence to measure brand equity, we break each component down into specific questions that address and analyze the current strength of your brand.
We use a strong brand strategy and your on-campus knowledge to transition from research to implementation. Our recommendations for effective implementation are customized for each institution or department, depending on the strength of your brand strategy and future vision.
The next step is to apply the data and insights into actionable strategies you can use to inform ongoing brand strategy work. Let’s walk through each category in the Brand Equity framework.
To assess the effectiveness of the university’s brand awareness, they needed to understand the role their religious affiliation played in influencing audience perceptions. Social intelligence insights identified opportunities for the marketing team to elevate their brand, support improvements in enrollment and donor outcomes, and ensure a stable financial future for the institution.
The insights and data give the central marketing team a clear understanding of their brand, and a brand messaging guide and audience personas support a unified brand experience. Market research findings support their strategic planning and competitive positioning efforts, and enable the president and cabinet to make data-informed decisions. Each cabinet level team leverages the findings to support their vision, guide the direction of their department, and drive forward actionable opportunities. Regular individual and group discussions streamline workstreams and efficiency across campus, establish a cohesive brand messaging approach, and support collaboration.
The campus continues to use social intelligence insights to assess the impact of new brand messaging, shift their visual identity, and evolve their enrollment growth strategy.
For this campus it was important to look back historically and use data to determine how audience perceptions changed over time in order to best position the university for the future. We compared the university’s audience perceptions to competitors in order to identify clear strengths, brand differentiators, and opportunities to support the campaign launch. Using social intelligence before launching a new brand campaign helped the campus benchmark their current brand presence against the industry so they could analyze their positioning within the scope of the marketplace. The historical data gave them a broader perspective of how their brand changed over time, and the influence athletics has on their brand.
This campus was in the middle of an award-winning marketing campaign and realized that brand management is effective in the pre-planning stages as well as during the implementation of a comprehensive fundraising campaign. We used social intelligence to identify how their brand pillars were represented in the market and identified opportunities for brand alignment and the university’s vision across many different campus departments.
The institution also used social intelligence findings to assess their brand’s impact over time, specifically understanding shifts in owned and earned messaging related to brand pillars. This allowed them to develop a deeper understanding of their reputation, current audience perceptions, and evolve their brand narrative. As the narrative changed over time, they adapted their strategic plans to make timely decisions based on perceptional shifts.
Brand and reputation management is one of the earliest and most significant applications of social intelligence. Learn more about how we use market research to refine brand positioning and enhance strategy or read our case studies.