Brand health is one of those terms that gets thrown around in marketing meetings, but what does it actually mean? And more importantly, how do you measure something as seemingly intangible as the "health" of your brand?

In this comprehensive guide, we'll demystify brand health measurement, show you how to move beyond basic vanity metrics, and provide actionable frameworks for tracking the vitality of your brand over time. 

What is brand health?

Brand health refers to the overall strength, perception, and performance of your brand in the marketplace. It's a holistic measure of how well your brand is performing against key objectives, how consumers perceive and feel about your brand, and how effectively you're building equity over time. 

Think of it like a check-up for your brand. Just as you'd visit a doctor to assess your physical health through various tests and measurements, brand health measurement evaluates multiple indicators to give you a complete picture of your brand's wellbeing. 

A healthy brand typically exhibits: 

  • Strong awareness in its target market 
  • Positive sentiment and associations 
  • Customer loyalty and advocacy 
  • Competitive differentiation 
  • Consistent performance against business objectives 

Why brand health measurement matters

Brand health measurement is vital, yet so many businesses avoid it or resort to using basic KPIs that don't provide actionable insights. They end up with findings that are not agile or actionable, and sometimes these results are so general that they could be misinterpreted. 

Without proper brand health measurement, you're essentially flying blind. You might think your brand is performing well based on sales numbers, but miss warning signs of eroding brand equity that could impact future performance. Or you might invest heavily in initiatives that don't actually move the needle on the metrics that matter most to your business. 

Effective brand health measurement allows you to: 

  • Detect issues early - Spot problems before they become crises, whether that's negative sentiment building, losing ground to competitors, or misalignment between your brand positioning and consumer perception 
  • Make data-driven decisions - Ground strategic choices in evidence rather than hunches, from product development to marketing messaging 
  • Track progress over time - See whether your initiatives are actually improving brand health or if you need to change course 
  • Benchmark against competitors - Understand not just how you're doing in isolation, but how you stack up against rivals 
  • Demonstrate marketing ROI - Show leadership teams how brand-building activities contribute to business outcomes 
  • Identify opportunities - Uncover white space in the market or underserved audience needs 

The problem with basic brand health metrics

Many teams get bogged down in simple metrics before thinking about the wider implications of their work. Often, leadership teams will ignore what social or marketing teams are telling them because the metrics just don't include the nuance that's needed for them to take action. 

Let's look at two commonly misused metrics: 

Share of voice

Share of voice tells you what percentage of category conversation mentions your brand. But there's no context in these numbers. If Business A has 30% more online mentions than Business B, what does that actually mean? What's driving those mentions? More isn't always better. 

A spike in mentions could indicate a successful campaign – or a PR crisis. Without digging deeper into what people are actually saying, share of voice alone doesn't tell you much about brand health. 

Sentiment analysis

"90% of conversation around our brand is positive!" That might sound great, but what are the mentions about? Basic sentiment analysis measures the tone of text, but the positive driver of those mentions might have nothing to do with your brand, sector, or industry. 

For example, a coffee brand might see highly positive sentiment, but upon closer examination, most of those positive mentions are about people enjoying their morning coffee routine – not specifically about what makes that brand special or different. 

Both of these metrics are great ways of discovering topics, issues, and opportunities that can be further drilled into, but neither should be seen as a golden metric, especially in isolation and without proper context. 

How to approach brand health measurement

Start with business objectives

It might seem obvious, but starting with high-level business objectives is the best place to begin. From there, strategies can be built out that ladder up to company goals and generate actionable insights that make a difference. 

When deciding how to measure brand health, start by considering your company's and your brand's overall objectives — all the way up to the company's mission statement. You want to ensure you always have an eye on those goals because, when approaching something like brand health, it is really easy to get caught up in discussion of KPIs and metrics and forget to consider what you're trying to achieve at a broader level. 

Ask yourself: 

  • What are our company's overall goals? 
  • What outcomes are we trying to achieve? 
  • Who are the key audiences we're trying to reach? 
  • What does success look like for our brand? 
  • How does our brand contribute to larger business objectives? 

Once you've clarified these questions, you can work your way down to a level of granularity that helps you convey actionable brand health information to leadership.

Go beyond basic metrics

Going beyond basic metrics can make measuring brand health intimidating. It's perhaps more comfortable to focus on rudimentary analysis than to start with the larger problems. But this is where the real value lies. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to brand health measurement.

There is some fundamental consistency in how we approach brand health measurement programs, but the best ones are customized and built out according to what's important to a specific industry and specific customer needs. 

Clients who look at a more granular level to measure brand health are on the right path. Instead of just asking "what's our sentiment?" or "how many mentions do we have?", they're asking: 

  • What specific attributes drive positive perception of our brand? 
  • How do consumers perceive us versus competitors on dimensions that matter to purchase decisions? 
  • What are the pain points in the customer experience? 
  • How has perception shifted over time? 
  • Which audience segments view us most favorably and why? 

The importance of a yardstick

Brand health measurement is impossible without something to check performance against. You need context to understand whether your metrics indicate good or bad health. 

There are three key ways to make this comparison: 

  1. Measuring against your own previous performance - Track how your metrics change over time. Are you improving or declining? This internal benchmarking helps you see the impact of your initiatives. 
  2. Measuring against your competitors - How do you stack up against rivals on key brand health dimensions? Competitive benchmarking provides crucial context. 
  3. Measuring against aspirational brands - Those you might not compete against directly but admire. Aspirational benchmarking helps you understand what world-class brand health looks like. 

You have to have a yardstick to help you define what good looks like and what bad looks like. Whatever your approach, keeping your methodology consistent over time is key. If you change how you measure, you lose the ability to track trends and progress. 

Key brand health metrics to track

While brand health measurement should be customized to your business objectives, here are core metrics that most brands should consider: 

Brand awareness

What it measures: How familiar your target audience is with your brand. 

Why it matters: You can't build brand health if people don't know you exist. Awareness is typically measured as aided (recognizing your brand from a list) or unaided (spontaneously thinking of your brand when asked about a category). 

How to measure: 

  • Surveys asking about brand recognition and recall 
  • Search volume for brand terms 
  • Direct traffic to your website 
  • Social media engagement or follower growth 

Brand consideration

What it measures: Whether consumers would consider your brand when making a purchase decision. 

Why it matters: Awareness alone doesn't drive sales. Consideration indicates you're in the running when someone is ready to buy. 

How to measure: 

  • Survey questions about likelihood to consider 
  • Shopping cart additions and abandonment rates 
  • Mention in purchase-intent conversations on social media 
  • Inclusion in comparison content and reviews 

Brand perception and attributes

What it measures: What consumers think and feel about your brand, and which attributes they associate with you. 

Why it matters: Perception drives behavior. If you want to be known for innovation but consumers see you as traditional, that misalignment will impact performance. 

How to measure: 

  • Surveys measuring agreement with brand attribute statements 
  • Social listening to understand brand associations 
  • Word clouds and topic analysis from customer feedback 
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction scores 

Brand loyalty and advocacy

What it measures: How likely customers are to repeat purchase and recommend you to others.

Why it matters: It costs less to retain customers than acquiring new ones, and brand advocates provide invaluable word-of-mouth marketing. 

How to measure: 

  • Repeat purchase rates 
  • Customer lifetime value 
  • Net promoter score (NPS) 
  • Social media mentions and sentiment 
  • Reviews and ratings 
  • Referral program participation 

Share of voice

What it measures: Your brand's share of the conversation in your category. 

Why it matters: While not meaningful in isolation, when combined with sentiment and context, share of voice indicates visibility and relevance. 

How to measure: 

  • Social listening tools tracking brand mentions versus competitors 
  • Media monitoring across news sites, print, and broadcast media 
  • Advertising spend share (paid share of voice) 

Purchase intent

What it measures: How likely consumers are to buy from you.

Why it matters: This is the metric most directly tied to business outcomes and revenue. 

How to measure: 

  • Survey questions about purchase likelihood 
  • Behavioral signals like email list signups, demo requests, or cart additions 
  • Social listening for intent indicators ("thinking about buying," "looking for") 

Customizing brand health measurement for your industry

Since all measurement activity should ladder up to key organizational objectives, the way you define brand health will be different depending on your brand, category, or sector. 

Example: Retail brand

One of your functional objectives might be to make the shopping experience easier for your customers. So something you might want to measure is how people are talking about their in-store experiences, segmenting that discussion by the most important customer experience categories. Consider measuring: 

  • How customers talk about their in-store experiences 
  • Website usability (ease of locating items using the app, checkout process, payment options) 
  • Mentions of speed, convenience, and customer service 
  • Comparison to competitors on these dimensions 

This type of granularity leads to actionable insights; standard share of voice will not. 

Example: B2B technology company

If you're a B2B tech brand, your objectives might focus on being seen as an industry thought leader and trusted partner. Your brand health metrics might include: 

  • Share of voice in industry publications and conferences 
  • Sentiment and perception of expertise in key technology areas 
  • Association with innovation and reliability 
  • Customer success story visibility 
  • Employee advocacy and employer brand health 

Example: Consumer packaged goods

For a CPG brand, you might focus on:

  • Top-of-mind awareness when consumers think about your category 
  • Perception of quality, value, and taste 
  • Purchase frequency and basket penetration 
  • Share of voice during key shopping seasons 
  • Sentiment around sustainability or other brand values 

The key is aligning your measurement framework with what actually drives success in your specific context. 

How to measure brand health across different audiences

Brand health isn't monolithic. Different audience segments may perceive your brand very differently. Measuring brand health across audiences allows you to understand where you're strong and where you have opportunities. 

Audience segmentation is crucial. You might segment by: 

  • Demographics - Age, gender, location, income 
  • Psychographics - Values, interests, lifestyles 
  • Behavioral - Purchase history, engagement level, channel preference 
  • Professional - Job title, industry, company size  

With tools like Brandwatch Social Panels, you can search for particular groups of people based on criteria like gender, location, interest, profession, or bio keywords to analyze their conversations and perceptions. 

For example, a movie theater chain might want to understand how self-identified movie buffs perceive their brand versus casual moviegoers. By applying audience panels to queries, they can identify which attributes matter most to each segment and tailor their strategy accordingly. 

How to set up brand health tracking

Choose your measurement frequency

Brand health should be monitored at multiple cadences: 

  • Continuous monitoring - Set up automated alerts for significant changes in key metrics. This allows you to react quickly to crises or opportunities. 
  • Weekly/monthly pulse checks - Quick dashboards that let you take the pulse of your brand's vital signs at a frequent cadence. 
  • Quarterly deep dives - More comprehensive analysis that looks at trends, correlates metrics, and provides strategic insights. 
  • Annual comprehensive reviews - Full brand health audits that inform strategic planning for the year ahead. 

It's critical to set up a brand health measurement program that allows you to take a quick pulse check of your brand's vital signs at a frequent cadence, and then allow for a more comprehensive, deep dive examination of brand health at longer intervals. 

Select your data sources

The best brand health programs blend multiple data sources: 

  • Survey data - Provides direct insight into consumer attitudes, but can be expensive and time-consuming. Use for quarterly or annual deep dives. 
  • Social listening data - Offers real-time, unfiltered consumer opinion at scale. Use for continuous monitoring and monthly pulse checks. 
  • Customer data - Purchase history, lifetime value, retention rates. Your CRM and analytics tools provide behavioral truth. 
  • Search data - Google Trends and search analytics reveal what people are actively looking for related to your brand. 
  • Sales data - Ultimate proof of brand health. Strong brands drive revenue growth. 
  • Web analytics - Traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics indicate brand strength and interest. 

Brand health measurement is best when it includes many different digital data streams. Integrating owned data, data from primary research, search data, and publicly available data streams provides the most complete picture. 

Create a brand health dashboard

Once you've defined your metrics and data sources, create a dashboard that makes brand health visible at a glance. 

A simple approach is to create a scorecard that tracks key metrics month over month, with indicators showing whether each metric is healthy (green), cautionary (yellow), or concerning (red). 

Important considerations for your dashboard

There is a big caveat to this approach. You must be careful with some metrics for the time periods you cover. 

Survey sentiment and share of voice might stay fairly consistent, while others, like online sentiment, can change quickly, making it harder to compare over short periods. Looking at larger periods may hide important insights, as it could mask results by averaging them. 

In this case, there are two solutions: 

  1. Only include a certain time period - Like the past year or six months, so you're comparing apples to apples 
  2. 2. Look at percentage change - This means you can see any recent changes quickly. Unfortunately, percent change means it's hard to compare to historical data, and it removes context. It's often worth including this along with the raw numbers so there’s additional context 

Of course, you could set up the table differently if you like. Tailor it to your specific needs and metrics. From there, you can get an overall view of your brand health with a simple table and take action accordingly. 

Advanced brand health measurement techniques

Custom classifiers for nuanced analysis

Finding out what people are saying about specific aspects of your brand is easy with the right tool. Using Brandwatch Consumer Research, you can collect online mentions of your brand and then use Custom Classifiers to break down conversation by topic. 

Custom Classifiers can be trained to recognize that a mention is about a particular topic – even if that topic is a little enigmatic. For instance, you might train classifiers to recognize when someone is talking about:

  • In-store experiences versus online ordering 
  • Product quality versus customer service 
  • Price/value versus features 
  • Different product lines or categories 

Classifiers can be trained with as few as 10 mentions per category, but we'd recommend training with at least 25 posts for better accuracy. You can train them to recognize themes about your own brand and also about your competitors, all at once. This allows you to benchmark your brand health against competitors on specific dimensions. 

Blending digital datasets for better insights

With data upload capabilities, you can analyze any text-based data you own directly in a platform like Brandwatch Consumer Research — things like online or offline surveys or chat and call logs. This means that multiple sources of brand health data can be analyzed alongside each other. 

So much data is siloed across an organization. By connecting with different departments and bringing datasets together, analysts can get a 360-degree view of brand health. 

For example, you might combine: 

  • Post-purchase survey feedback 
  • Customer service chat logs 
  • Social media conversations 
  • Product reviews from multiple platforms 
  • In-store feedback (if captured digitally) 

Comparing these datasets can reveal whether certain issues are universal or channel-specific, and whether perception gaps exist between what customers say publicly versus privately. 

Set up appropriate alert systems

While the methodology must be kept consistent, brand health measurement shouldn't be a 'set it and forget it' activity. Not only should it be checked at appropriate cadences, but changes in the data should be monitored continually. 

Within Brandwatch Consumer Resaerch:  

  • Alerts can be set up so that particular incidents online will immediately spark notifications to key stakeholders. This could be a brand mention from a journalist, or a post containing a particular keyword or phrase. Alerts are a very flexible and highly customizable tool. 
  • Signals are similar to Alerts, but will monitor online conversations for things that a brand might not even be aware of. For example, it will notify stakeholders when there is a change in the conversation like a spike in negative sentiment or around a particular topic. 

Both Alerts and Signals help with continuous brand health monitoring, enabling brands to react quickly to opportunities and crises without anyone needing to be logged into the platform at the time. 

Common brand health measurement mistakes to avoid

Mistake 1: Procrastinating on setup

Because a good brand health measurement system will include a number of brand attributes and could require some fine tuning, developing one can seem daunting. Many will say "I'll get to it, next quarter or next year." The can keeps getting kicked down the road. 

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Start with a basic framework and refine it over time. It's better to have imperfect measurement than no measurement at all. 

Mistake 2: Focusing only on vanity metrics

Likes, follower counts, and raw mention volumes might look impressive in a presentation, but do they actually correlate with business outcomes? Focus on metrics that connect to your business objectives. 

Mistake 3: Measuring in isolation

Brand health metrics without competitive context or historical trends are meaningless. Always measure against a yardstick. 

Mistake 4: Inconsistent methodology

If you keep changing what and how you measure, you can't track progress over time. Establish a consistent methodology and stick with it. 

Mistake 5: Measuring without acting

The ability to take action is key. Brand health measurement should uncover white space opportunities, vulnerabilities where course correction is needed, and insights that drive strategic decisions. If insights aren't leading to action, you're wasting resources on measurement. 

Mistake 6: Not customizing to your business

One-size-fits-all brand health measurement tools miss what's really important to your specific business, and they can skip over important differences that come with a particular sector or category. 

Socializing brand health insights

Like with any research, the most important thing is what's done with the findings — how do they effect change? 

For many people conducting brand health measurement, there will be various key internal stakeholder groups that can take the insights and act upon them – from product teams to customer success to executive leadership. 

While there is a lot of nuance to brand health measurement, socializing insights needs to be a simple process, especially for time-poor leaders. 

Tips for communicating brand health insights

  • Use visual dashboards - Make data easy to understand at a glance with color-coded indicators and clear visualizations. 
  • Tell stories, not just numbers - Context matters. Explain what the numbers mean and why they matter to business outcomes. 
  • Connect to objectives - Always tie brand health metrics back to company goals so leadership understands the relevance. 
  • Provide recommendations, not just data - Don't just say "sentiment is declining." Explain why it's happening and what should be done about it. 
  • Tailor to your audience - Executive summaries for C-suite, tactical insights for marketing teams, product-specific data for product managers. 
  • Regular cadence - Don't surprise stakeholders with brand health data only when there's a problem. Share updates regularly so trends are visible. 

Brand health measurement tools

Brandwatch Consumer Research

Brandwatch Consumer Research provides comprehensive social listening and consumer intelligence capabilities for tracking brand health. With access to over 100 million websites (including popular social media sites, forums, news, and blogs), plus historical data back to 2010, you can track brand health metrics over time and benchmark against competitors. Key features for brand health measurement include: 

  • Real-time sentiment and emotion analysis 
  • Custom Classifiers for nuanced topic categorization 
  • Social Panels for audience segmentation 
  • Competitive benchmarking 
  • Historical trend analysis 
  • Alerts and Signals for continuous monitoring 
  • The option to upload your own data 

Survey platforms

For primary research and direct consumer feedback: 

  • Qualtrics 
  • SurveyMonkey 
  • Typeform 

Analytics platforms

For behavioral data: 

  • Google Analytics (website behavior) 
  • Adobe Analytics (enterprise analytics) 
  • Mixpanel (product analytics) 

The best approach typically combines multiple tools to get a complete picture of brand health from different angles. 

Conclusion

Brand health measurement doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need to be strategic, consistent, and customized to your business objectives. 

The key takeaways: 

  • Start with your business objectives and work backward to define meaningful metrics 
  • Go beyond basic vanity metrics to measure what actually matters 
  • Use a competitive yardstick to provide context 
  • Blend multiple data sources for a complete picture 
  • Monitor at multiple cadences—continuous (with automated alerts so you don’t need to be continuously logged in), monthly, quarterly, and annually 
  • Customize your approach to your industry and brand Set up systems for action, not just measurement 
  • Communicate insights effectively to drive change 

Remember: assessing brand health can be tricky, and it takes finesse to customize for every business. But if you do it right, it can become critically important within your organization, providing the insights needed to build lasting brand equity and drive business growth. 

Don't let the can keep getting kicked down the road. Start measuring your brand health today, even if it's with a simple framework. You can always refine and expand as you go. The important thing is to start tracking, so you can start improving.