What is brand health?
Brand health is about how well your brand is doing in the market. This includes hitting your business targets and how folks view you. It has a lot of things that show how people know, remember, and feel about your brand.
Some of the main indicators include:
- Customer perception and loyalty
- Market share and awareness
- Reputation and sentiment
- Overall satisfaction and advocacy
In short, brand health tells you what’s going on inside people’s minds (and hearts) when they think about your brand.
Why brand tracking matters
Health is wealth — and that totally applies to brands too. A healthy brand means happy customers, steady growth, and an edge over competitors. But it’s not just about profit. Brand tracking also helps you understand how your audience is changing, what drives their choices, and how you can stay relevant in a noisy market.
Here’s why it’s worth tracking:
1. Understand Strengths and Weaknesses
Brand tracking shows what your audience really loves about you — and what maybe needs fixing. Knowing your strongest brand qualities, USPs, and key purchase drivers helps you focus your marketing on what actually works. Combining this with monitoring social media conversations allows you to see real-time feedback, identify common pain points, and uncover emerging customer needs.
2. Stay Ahead of Competitors
Even if you’re the market leader, you can’t relax. By keeping an eye on which brands people prefer (and how those preferences shift), you’ll know exactly where you stand — and how to stay a step ahead.
3. Measure Awareness and Perception
Is your brand awareness growing, flatlining, or falling off a cliff? Are you connecting with the right audience? Brand tracking helps answer all that. In today’s fast-changing market, perception really is everything.
4. Find New Opportunities
Keeping tabs on your brand’s vibe can show you stuff you weren’t looking for – like what’s getting popular, what people want that they aren’t getting, or if a whole new group of people are suddenly interested. This stuff can spark ideas for your next ad push or ways to grow.
Basically, watching your brand’s health helps you make better calls based on facts and makes sure your marketing money is spent where it counts the most.
What makes a brand “Healthy”?
A healthy brand isn’t just about profit numbers or quarterly wins. It’s about being visible, trusted, and consistent — showing up in the right places, connecting with the right people, and following through on your promises.
A healthy brand:
- It is easy to recognize and remember
- Builds trust and credibility over time
- Connects emotionally with its audience
- Delivers consistent quality and messaging
And when all that clicks, your business performance naturally improves. Strong brand health drives higher ROI, reduces customer acquisition costs, and builds loyalty that lasts.
Key brand health metrics to track
Let’s break down some of the most important metrics you should be watching.
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS shows how likely customers are to recommend your brand. It’s a simple but really powerful way to measure loyalty.
How to measure it:
Ask — “On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend [brand] to a friend?”
- 9–10 = Promoters
- 7–8 = Passives
- 1–6 = Detractors
Then subtract Detractors from Promoters. A score above 0 is good. Above 50? You’ve got serious brand fans.
2. Purchase Intent
This tells you how likely people are to buy from your brand soon. It’s not just awareness — it’s intent to act.
Ask: “Based on what you know about [brand], how likely are you to buy from them?”
If that number’s high, your marketing and customer experience are clearly doing their job.
3. Unprompted Brand Recall
This checks if people think of your brand right away.
Ask: “What’s the first brand you think of when you think of [industry]?”
If many people mention you first, that’s a great sign.
4. Preference in Category (Prompted Recall)
This looks at how people view your brand next to others.
Ask: “Which of these brands would you consider buying?”
If people pick you a lot, your messaging is working.
5. Brand Uplift
This is about the worth your brand adds to a regular product.
Run two similar ads—one with your brand, one without—and look at the clicks. The difference shows how much your brand affects what people do.
6. Share of Voice (SOV)
This tells you how much of the market talk is about your brand. It measures how visible you are in the media and online.
By watching mentions, views, or attention, you can see how your brand does over time.
7. Sentiment Analysis
It’s not enough to know people are talking about your brand — you need to know how they feel. Are conversations positive, neutral, or negative? That’s where social media sentiment analysis makes this easier by tracking emotional tone across posts, comments, and reviews. They automatically identify spikes in positive or negative chatter, helping you manage PR risks or celebrate wins in real time.
- “How would you describe [brand] in one word?”
- “What’s one thing [brand] should never change?”
- “If you could change one thing about [brand], what would it be?”
Final Thoughts
Your brand is super important if you treat it right. Think of it like taking care of yourself – you need to check in on it regularly. Keep an eye on how many people know about your brand, what they think of it, and if they’re sticking around. This keeps your brand in good shape for anything that comes your way. If your brand is in good shape, it doesn’t just get by; it does really well.