Executive teams often mistake their basic awareness of the marketplace for the strength of their brand and create a SWOT analysis that contains unsupported (and therefore useless) assertions. A brand advantage is a marketable product formed by an operational asset that generates customer loyalty and supports price defense or lowered acquisition costs against competitors.
This guide will identify, quantify, and convert abstract brand attributes into specific, substantiated strategic benefits for organizations.
The Operational Reality of Brand Strength
Brand experiences that include "product quality" and "service level" are frequently cited by many companies as their main advantages. These experiences represent a company's internally-developed capability and represent a portion of the company's operational effectiveness as a market leader, rather than true brand strengths examples.
Only if customers recognize this capability, believe in the company's capability, and make their purchase decisions based upon that belief, does this capability become a brand strength for that particular product or service.
If the competitor can easily replicate a process, that particular capability does not constitute an operating brand asset.
The true definition of a brand strength is determined by how customers perceive a brand as providing superior customer-related services compared to other brands within the market. This differential form of brand strength allows the company to gain customers, retain customers, and withstand the competitive pressures of the marketplace.
Most people are able to recognize the name of a brand when asked. Brand equity represents all the financial value of a brand within the marketplace. Although brand strength drives brand equity, it differs from it in that a company's brand strength incorporates the needs and wants of consumers, as well as the respective qualities of the brand within the marketplace. When assessing brand strength, multiple forms of qualitative data should be utilized in conjunction with quantitative financial metrics that indicate the economic value of a brand.
25 Categories of Actionable Brand Strengths Examples
In order for a SWOT analysis to provide additional insights into an organization's brand position, executives must use precise terminology. The framework below identifies distinct advantages for a brand by providing supporting evidence for each brand advantage.
Brand Recognition: When it comes to this category, our company can be named without prompting by our customers. Evidence to track: Unaided recall and direct traffic.
Visual Identity: Customers can recognize our brand assets without needing to see our brand name to identify it. Evidence to track: Design recall and shelf visibility.
Customer Trust: Customers view the company to be a trusted source of information. Evidence to track: Trust surveys and customer reviews sentiment.
Customer Loyalty: Our current customers have a tendency to choose our product repeatedly over competing products. Evidence to track: Retention and subscription renewal rates.
Premium Pricing Positioned: Customers see our brand's offer as a premium priced product. Evidence to track: Average order value and pricing premium.
Clear Differentiation: We own a unique benefit in the marketplace that our competitors cannot offer. Evidence to track: Win-loss interviews and attribute-based studies.
Consistent Customer Experience: Each customer has a similar purchase process regardless of how they purchased. Evidence to track: Net Promoter Score and mystery shopping.
Product Quality: Our product will ultimately solve the customer's core problem more reliably than any other product available. Evidence to track: Defective product return rate and repeat purchase rate.
Service Reputation: Our support team is responsive and prevents customers from abandoning ship. Evidence to track: Support resolution time and customer satisfaction.
Community Strength: Customers have a feeling of connectedness to a community who supports and uses our product. Evidence to track: User generated content and referrals.
Corporate Storytelling: We tell a memorable story that conveys why our product is valuable. Evidence to track: Message and story recall and engagement quality.
Founder Credibility: A founder's level of experience adds local credibility. Evidence to track: Internet search demand for founder and sales feedback related to founder.
Category Authority: Our brand is viewed by the marketplace as the leading source of knowledge and expertise in our category. Evidence to track: Backlinks and public speaking invitations.
Proprietary Technology: We hold technology or systems that others cannot use or replicate. Evidence to track: Patents and switching costs.
Strength of Ecosystem: Products or services become increasingly valuable when sold in combination. Evidence to track: Cross-sell rates and active integrations.
Distribution Power: We are highly visible in channels customers are already using. Evidence to track: Channel coverage and availability for purchase.
Local Relevance: Our product is well suited for the needs of local markets. Evidence to track: Local conversion rates and local customer reviews.
Cultural Relevance: Our brand connects with current social conversations. Evidence to track: Brand lift studies and earned media.
Employer Brand: We attract top talent because potential employees support our mission. Evidence to track: Acceptance rates among applicants and applicant quality.
Partner Network: Experienced partners promote credibility and enhance the market reach of our brand. Evidence to track: Revenue generated through partnering and product/solutions that have been integrated and adopted by partners.
Niche Reputation: We are known to hold the highest level of trust among a narrow segment of buyers. Evidence to track: Awareness of market segment and review quality.
Customer Advocacy: Customers promote our brand actively without any incentive to do so. Evidence to track: Referral rates and activity related to customer advocacy.
Operational Reliability: We are able to uphold all promises, regardless of the size of the business, as long as we are operational 100% of the time. Evidence to track: The uptime percentage of our company is excellent, and we have on-time delivery rates that will satisfy customers.
Innovation Capability: We are able to change an industry while still remaining true to ourselves. Evidence to track: Through the output of R&D and the number of new products that are adopted into the marketplace.
Distinctive Voice: All media for our organization use the same "voice" so customers can recognize our company in multiple media types. Evidence to track: We measure this through message-recognition testing and qualitative audits.
Real-World Brand Strengths Examples and Breakdowns
Examining global market leaders has revealed how the theoretical advantages that have been developed by brand leaders are translated to actual advantages in the marketplace. Brand leaders link specific strengths to measurable outcomes and commercial successes:
1. Apple
The company's brand is built on the strength of its ecosystem and its ability to position itself as a premium-priced company. Apple's strategy of integrating both hardware and software has created switching costs for users.
Because of this unique strategy, Apple is able to maintain a high level of profitability. Customers of the Apple brand believe in Apple's ability to provide quality design and innovation, thus they have no problem paying a premium price.
2. Nike
The company has established a very strong and unique visual identity as well as established cultural relevance. The Swoosh logo is a well-known and immediately recognizable brand asset, associated with athletic encouragement.
Because Nike is so well recognized, it has demonstrated the ability to be included in the consumer consideration set at a faster rate than its competitors. Nike has eliminated the need to explain their products during every marketing campaign due to its high level of brand recognition.
3. Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola has a strong distribution network, coupled with high levels of brand recognition. Coca-Cola's color (red) and long history generate very strong emotional connections in regard to Coca-Cola as a company.
These emotional connections create preference among consumers at the point of purchase. Coca-Cola relies on these global brand associations to maintain a dominant position in terms of shelf space.
4. Starbucks
Starbucks has demonstrated the measurable value of customer loyalty programs. Starbucks utilizes a digital customer loyalty program that tracks purchase behavior and personalizes messages to its individual customers.
Through this data, Starbucks is able to collect enough data on consumers' purchasing habits that allows the company to encourage multiple repeat visits to its stores. Starbucks has progressed from a traditional commodity coffee provider to being a daily routine of consumers.
5. Tide
Tide has a very high degree of authority in its category and a strong perceived level of product quality in its category and has an ability to provide products with the highest level of performance.
First launched in 1946, this brand has dominated the market since then with a history of more than 70 years. It has built a nearly unshakable level of consumer trust by consistently communicating to its customers over many decades. Consumers subconsciously choose this product instead of a cheaper generic or private label option.
6. Liquid Death
Liquid Death is a good example of how having a unique brand voice can create a large amount of brand equity. With a distinct, edgy personality (inspired heavily by heavy metal), Liquid Death is able to set itself apart from other water brands that are otherwise viewed as boring.
Liquid Death's distinctive tone also makes it much easier to recall, hence driving its ability to differentiate itself in extreme ways from the competition. This allows Liquid Death to rapidly capture market share even in categories that involve a commodity like water.
7. Uber
Uber has a strong connection to its category and a reputation for reliability. The term Uber has been adopted by many referring to the entire ride-sharing market.
The continuous improvement of its apps and the features it adds provide a foundation of security for users. Users are happy to use the Uber service, knowing they will have an identical digital experience.
8. Trader Joe's
Trader Joe's creates an emotional connection with its customers through its fun, unique and identifiable voice. Trader Joe's differentiates itself from traditional grocery store operators by creating a "fun" culture that its loyal customers freely advertise.
Because Trader Joe's has a strong word-of-mouth community and customer loyalty, it spends very little on traditional advertising.
Writing Defensible SWOT Analysis Statements
Many companies write their strategic plans without using factual evidence. Simply saying that you have brand equity is meaningless unless you provide factual justification. In order for your statement to be valuable as a brand equity statement, you must include the specific advantage of your brand over the competition, a definition of your target market, and empirical proof of your statement.
When constructing your SWOT to include brand strengths examples, you must create individual statements for each of the components of your SWOT to create a total picture of your company's position.
The Evidence Based Writing Framework
The evidence based writing framework is designed to help you develop your SWOT in an accurate, consistent, and comprehensive way. Demonstrating a strategic outcome includes establishing a specific strength, target segment, demonstrating evidence, and of course, showing results.
Most consumer brands are not the only organizations needing an exact statement, as the same approach applies to other businesses as well. A statement like "We have amazing tech" would fall short.
A pragmatic B2B statement would say, "We have a significant amount of authority in the SaaS startup industry, demonstrated by regularly receiving positive referral leads, thus reducing our outbound customer acquisition cost."
Measurement of the Brand Advantage
In order for any strength to be valid, it needs to be quantified. For each perceived strength, a company must attach a primary quantitative metric in addition to a digital indicator as proof of the strength. Do not rely on one indicator. True market strength will incorporate three distinct types of indicators: awareness, perception, and sales metrics.
Awareness and Perception Indicators
You must monitor how easily the public can recall your brand. A clear way to demonstrate this is through unaided brand recall and branded search impressions showing that buyers are specifically searching for you by name.
Perception can be assessed using trust surveys and by connecting company characteristics to brand attribute associations. It is essential that the public views the brand as the leadership team has intended.
Sales and Behavioral Metrics
Using sales and behavioral metrics will enable a company to determine whether the perception of a product is influencing a buyer's decision-making behavior. Market loyalty can be measured through the repeat purchase or re-subscription rates as well as through the retention of customers.
The most significant indicator of a brand's strength is through its financial results. Companies that continually produce superior financial performance demonstrate that demand for their product exceeds their competitors' demand. They enjoy a higher than average price premium and lower cost of acquiring new customers compared to all competitors within their industry.
An organization's ultimate test of its brand strategy will be the high rate of success in winning new customers, high price premiums, and low customer acquisition costs.
Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
For a business to have a sustainable competitive advantage, it must create and communicate the perceived value of its brand. An organization that cannot turn its internal capabilities into publicly recognized market assets will ultimately only compete by providing the lowest price to customers.
The identification of a brand's true advantage will require ruthless objectivity from business leaders. Business leaders must remove their corporate egos and measure their brands by what customers actually value.
By forcing every claim of brand strength through the filters of behavioral evidence and financial performance measures, organizations will be able to fully utilize their brands as a measurable growth engine. The strategic mandate is clear: identification and proof of the brand advantage will enable an organization to dominate its competition through strong preference of customers for the organization. This will ultimately result in a significant decrease in the cost of customer acquisition over a long-term basis.
Executive Questions on Defensible Brand Strategy
When measuring the strength of a brand, how do we determine how to measure that strength when the product's sales cycle covers multiple years?
Long sales cycles, particularly in the B2B space, will make traditional daily measurement metrics like website traffic and immediate conversion rates not representative of the total sales process. Other metrics need to be tracked, such as branded search traffic from specific user IPs, executive attendance at specified events, and unforced mentions of brands during sales calls. Ultimately, the confirmation of brand strength will be the decrease in the time for a prospect to move from initial awareness to the final proposal stage.
What is the quickest method to assess the impact of any leakage of operations that are created by misalignment of a company's product or service promise to customers?
Leakage of operations are created because the marketing promise of the company is greater than what customers receive in service delivery. To assess for leakage quickly, cross-reference NPS with your company's churn rate during the first three months and the themes of customer support tickets called in by customers during that same period.
For example, your company's brand promise might be effortless but very successful service integration. However, if most of your customer service tickets are for complex setup problems your organization has created, your brand is experiencing significant misalignment. Furthermore, this misalignment will lead to long-term negative perceptions and loss of customer loyalty.
As a mid-market brand, how should we prioritize our brand investments compared to brands that have extensive budgets for building brand awareness?
Never try to compete with a brand's financial resources to achieve a level of brand awareness that is similar to larger competitors. Strategy should be redirected to creating a very specific reputation in a niche and gaining market dominance on a local or category level.
Use all financial resources to establish your organization's depth of expertise in a narrow section of the customer market through the utilization of case studies geared toward that niche. Develop high-quality partner networks to create a strong barrier of entry against broad-based marketing campaigns.