Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World

by Jenni Romaniuk

The book is about brand health tracking, one of the biggest (and most costly) sources of insights about brand performance and inputs into brand strategy that marketers engage in. But yet most trackers were designed pre-How Brands Grow, and so suffer from being not fit for purpose to provide insights to managers looking to grow their brands.
Jenni has conducted R&D into brand health tracking for the past decade, much of this is published in a disparate range of academic marketing journals, some of it is not published because it is more technical. This book brings together that R&D with Jenni and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institutes background in How Brands Grow to help brand managers and researchers design an evidence based, useful brand health tracking research instrument and help them get the most out of the information to inform their recommendations and implications.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Professional Development

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Jenni Romaniuk is a Research Professor and Associate Director (International) of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia Business School.

Reviews

[Colin A · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 if you’re looking to get up to speed on the latest thinking in brand tracking. Found lots of useful insight. Uses great analogies to explain theories. Sometimes need to read over things a few times to work out how to adopt the theories.

[Orestis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a difficult read with excellent reference materials, applicable to any marketer wanting to measure activity correctly. I.e., for growth, not for stat's sake.

[Coop · Rating 5 out of 5]

if only there was a way to laser beam this book into the brains of everyone i work with

[Simona Žeimytė · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's in the title. 'How to' guide to set up your brand tracker and why it matters.

[Grant · Rating 2 out of 5]

A recap of a lot of the same principles laid out in "How Brands Grow", but with a focus on metrics and measurement. This book is primarily about survey design and I feel that that should have been better reflected in the book's title. A lot of this is highly technical and could help in designing a survey, but most surveys that marketers design in-house would be customer satisfaction surveys. This would go to an internal database. And I feel this book is more relevant to specialized market research survey designers than marketing executives.

Understanding light/non-buyers' memories (or lack thereof) of your brand seems difficult to do. Most companies would likely have to contract out to a specialized survey/market research firm to do such detailed research vs. trying it in-house. I also think it's a bit overly granular and academic to go into different types of brand awareness: top-of-mind vs. prompted vs. spontaneous, and different types of word-of-mouth (non-buyer WOM, positive/negative WOM, etc.) These are semi-interesting on an academic level, perhaps, but I don't see companies realistically making such granular differentiations in the "real world", so to speak.

And, yes, the notion of "brand love" is mostly silly B.S. Romaniuk seems to acknowledge that.