Brand force

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Question - is your brand a "Power Player", a "Dinosaur", a "Predator" or a "Make-weight"?

This tool will help you answer that question!

Key action points

There are many ways to measure the strength of your brand, such as brand equity research, brand valuation and price/value research, and we recommend that you do all of these.

The Mud Valley Brand Force analysis is a composite measurement that asks two fundamental questions:

1. What is the strength of your brand in the market today?
2. How much momentum is there behind your brand - i.e. is it likely to strengthen or weaken vs. competition over the coming 2-3 years?

Within the model, these questions are then juxtaposed in a Directional grid, which suggests that your brand and competitive brands are respectively one of:

• Power players – strong in the market today, and with the level of investment and supportive intent to remain so
• Dinosaurs – strong in the market today, but likely to weaken in the future for lack of investment or positional power
• Predators – not big in the market yet, but with lots of momentum behind them. This is the position from which new market leaders typically emerge
• Make-weights – not significant brands in the market today, and likely to remain that way unless someone picks them up and decides to do something with them

In more detail …………..

The model allows you to assess the competitive brands within four customer segments, then gives you an overall analysis of all the segments combined according to the weighting you give each segment.

In order to do this we ask you to make 3 inter-related assessments:

1. Brand power - in common with several other companies, we believe that a brand has two core components:
• Brand stature, which is the extent to which you feel that the brand will not let you down, whether you like it or not
• Brand Intimacy, which is the extent to which you feel proud to be associated with that brand
• The third element is the segment's awareness of each brand

2. Brand Dynamic - again there are three elements here:

• the extent to which each brand is perceived to have a compelling proposition
• the extent to which the brand has positional power in the market, whether because of channel access, heritage, wealth etc.
• and the extent of the brand's intent to succeed in the market

3. Directional - combined Brand Power and Brand Dynamic, and adds the third dimension of market share

The Directional element of the Brand Force analysis gives an excellent indication of the issues facing any brand in one simple chart.

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