Solving The Value Equation

Brand Scorecard for Fast-Growth Enterprises

Building your Brand Equities will:

1. Generate “Gravity Demand Generation” (i.e. Pull Marketing) as opposed to always having to push with direct sales campaigns.
2. Shorten the sales cycles as the brand brings credibility and reassurance to decision makers.
3. Position you apart from the herd.
4. Increase customer loyalties and mitigate competitive threats.

Brand Scorecard for Fast Growth Enterprises:

Brand Measures	Description	Target
Recognition	What is the breadth and depth of your prospect market awareness? i.e. how distinguished is your brand? This is a summary indicator of the current customer, account and product penetration of major customers, along with annual goals (i.e. brand penetration).	> Percentage of target market that “knows” you?
Perception	Gravity Pull: - What percent of qualified leads are you converting by channel, and how long is the sales cycle? - Is your brand “premium” or “economy”? Does your brand express the brand type adequately? Is your brand recognizable and memorable? How legally protectable is your brand?	> How does your brand perception impact you?
Brand Value	Valuation Impact: - Customer retention & net lifetime value: The primary factor affecting customer profitability is retention as generally, the longer a customer stays with you, the more profitable they become. Therefore, customer profitability measured above benchmarked industry average is your brand price premium. - Customer loyalty: A variety of indicators can be used here, but the most common one is the number of referrals.	> What financial impact does the brand provide? (Normal profit *Price premium * Sales) + (Retention impact + Referral Impact)

Getting Started: Brand Measurement Process:

Generally, Ephor Group recommends surveying your brand value, perception attributes, and market recognition yearly and online brand equities being measured as part of your standard monthly sales and operations reporting package.

A yearly snapshot of your current brand value and other brand-related metrics sets a stake in the ground. Whether your goal is to assess the value of two brands for a merger or perhaps, to improve C-level awareness, brand measurement needs to be monitored to demonstrate improvement.

Online Brand Equities Scorecard

Online Brand Equity Measures	Month Over Month Change	Target Goal
Web Traffic	+12%	10% a month improvement
Interactions	-2%	10% a month improvement
Page Rankings	#1 for top 3 phrases	#1 for top 5 phrases
Cost-Per-Click	-29%	>$144 per prospect capture

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Taking Advantage of Opportunities in a Bear Economy

For entrepreneurs, the de-leveraging that continues in the financial markets means a weaker economy for 2009. The good news is that when it comes to decision making and execution, crisis forces us to eliminate waste and focus on what is truly important.

The following is a list of ten sizable opportunities that come from a bear economy:

1. The opportunity to weed out mediocre employees from your organization. When examining your employee base make cuts with surgical precision within functions and departments not an axe, but only cut once, and cut deeper than you think.
   
2. There is an opportunity for negotiating on everything from prices and contract lengths, to flexible payment terms. Try bartering as well.
   
3. Use this opportunity to reinforce your brand attributers, vision, mission, and corporate objectives. Over-communicate with everyone from suppliers to employees as well as investors, partners and particularly customers.
   
4. Use this opportunity to train everyone in your organization from the receptionist to the board room on how-to sell. Be sure to make it easy for employees to introduce sales opportunities and generate referrals. Incentives and rewards will help.
   
5. Teach employees to treat cash as precious: stretch your resources and dollars with social media programs, re-focus on referrals and networking, turn every staff member into a marketer, eliminate internal non-revenue producing functions, and/or evaluate 3^rd party outsourcing providers.
   
6. Recruit more than your fair share of star performers. Start by comparing the talent at your competitors or substitutes against your own.
   
7. In years of economic slowdowns top performing companies streamline operations, reduce costs and increase efficiencies. You now have a reason (“excuse”) with employees and partners and thus an opportunity for performance improvement initiatives so ACT NOW.
   
8. Invest in ways to and extend your capabilities through corporate acquisitions.
   
9. Expand your distribution with partnering and by forming strategic alliances. Look for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
   
10. And one final item to be thankful for in a bear economy: less holiday work parties.

In a tough economic climate, the strong will become stronger (at least in terms of market position) as the weak struggle.  Competitors and substitutes that squander precious capital have little margin for error and can be purchased at discount prices.  Others will fail altogether.  For top performing companies, a sluggish economy might be the recipe for long-term success.

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