“Now you see me. Now you don’t.”
Customers come and go. Brand Advocates stay. And, the reason they stay is because Brand Advocates are Advocates of Brand (by definition). They are not advocates of a blog, an email, social media, a catalog, or even a product in the end. Nor are they advocates of a single instance, a single experience. They are advocates for the endeavor, the whole enchilada. They stand behind the totality of what a/the brand represents, creates, believes in, and wishes to change. There is resonance between what the Brand Advocate thinks and the brand does. If the endeavor isn’t clear, noteworthy, or part of a consumer’s worldview, advocacy is simply not worth it.
Brand Advocacy and Brand Equity are not perfectly defined terms. ‘Brand Equity,’ historically, has been defined by the quest to quantify the value, nay, the impact of brand, in literal shareholder value. This has been an unwieldy venture at best. Here’s an example: “Brand equity is defined as the perceived value of a company based on its reputation.” This is a definition put forth by The Harris Poll (a polling company). The premise here is that if one brand has achieved a higher perceived value amongst the public, it can charge more for its product or service than a competing brand.
This sort of exercise is unwieldy because it requires an amalgamation of inputs such as customer awareness, recall, satisfaction, profitability, net promoter stats, and lifetime value. If you were to scan the landscape of methods of ranking, scoring, and weighting along with the methods rationalizing the inputs such as those listed previously, you’ll find a pretty healthy variety of approaches, with equally varying results. Sound qualitative exercises posing as quantitative. Qualitative because in most instances those compiling the results are taking survey data, awareness studies, some hard data in terms of profitability and costs of customer management, among others, and then subjectively wrangling a comparative result. Would be business leaders then compare how their brand stacks up relative to the competition. This might be useful for Coke and Pepsi, but highly suspect for a business trying to understand how well they are building equity, meaning a customer acquisition, adoption, and retention process that generates profitable returns that results in advocacy.
“ad·vo·ca·cy noun 1. public support for or recommendation of a particular cause or policy”
Advocacy is the holy grail. It’s the thing that should be measured without subjectivity. Measuring the ability a given company has generating and maintaining and arming Brand Advocates is the means to determining a brand’s equity, it’s ability to create shareholder value. Brand Advocacy is the little engine that drives growth and profit. Brand Advocates are what everyone seeks. The larger percentile of Brand Advocates any business has, the greater the success. The more effective a company is at building a bank of Brand Advocates the greater their success. Simple.
The caveat is that advocacy creation is dependent on a clearly demarcated brand intention, a point of view. If there isn’t something to agree or disagree with, there isn’t anything to support, and in turn, nothing to advocate for. If there’s nothing to advocate for, there is no advocacy, which means nothing to recommend and no reason for the consumer to remain devoted to their buying habit. This is why ‘brand switching’ happens. Hence the title of this piece: “Now you see me. Now you don’t.” Customers can be fickle.
Measuring the phenomena of Brand Advocate generation provides an objective, distinct assessment of a brand’s equity. For more on the subject, read The equity of brand.
“Word-of-Mouth is the most efficient form of branding, marketing, advertising, and selling. Brand Advocates are the most powerful medium. Arming the Brand Advocate then with a highly repeatable thought is the ultimate campaign strategy.”