Page 254 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

Brand Development and Brand Strategy 223

Also, in order to improve the effectiveness of the communications, it is
important at this stage, to track all marketing expenditures by product, pro-
motional tool, stage of the life cycle, and observed effects in order to
establish a baseline for the improvement of the usage of these tools.

Public Relations
The purpose of public relations in the development of the brand image is to
encourage the public to have positive feelings about the brand. However,
unlike marketing, which is an essential activity that is very visible in the
development of the brand, a well-executed public relations campaign is not
visible (Levine 2003, p. 17). The public relations activity achieves its objectives
by encouraging third parties to deliver positive messages about the brand.
These messages are usually delivered through news organizations and print
journalists in the form of news and press releases (Levine 2003, p. 17). Because
the company does not have any control over the news outlet, a challenge during
this step is ensuring that the delivered message is true to the brand image.

8.3.6 Brand Evaluation

Measuring the Return on Brand Investment
This purpose of this step is to measure the performance of the brand in the
marketplace. The classical brand management process emphasized two metrics:
recall and awareness of the brand (Davis 2000). However, these measures alone
are not suited for measuring the brand performance, as determined by the equity
value of the brand. In order to provide information for managing the brand as an
asset, brand performance measures should (Davis 2000)
• Provide an understanding of how the brand is performing internally and
externally
• Provide information about the return on investment of marketing and
branding strategies
• Assist the organization in its resource allocation decisions
• Provide information for rewards and incentive systems

Some of the additional brand performance measures include
• Acquired customers
• Lost customers
• Customer satisfaction
• Purchase frequency
• Market share
• Return on advertising
• Price premium