It's really hard to know your own strengths and weaknesses. Getting an objective measure of what you're good and bad at takes some serious honesty and self-reflection.
Not investing the time and effort to know yourself can have long-term impacts on your happiness and wellbeing.
But what if you're trying to measure a brand?
Just like the challenges associated with personal growth, few managers have the time to step back and objectively assess their brand’s particular strengths and weaknesses.
And since most weaknesses are by nature hard to spot they usually persist for months or years, slowly hurting a company's sales and margins.
Luckily, there is a way to quickly find and fix these silent killers.
The solution is to create a standardized way for managers to think about grading their brand’s performance.
In other words, you need to create a report card for your brand.
Overview
The Brand Report Card was and article published by marketing professor Kevin Keller in the Harvard Business Review in 2000.
It identifies 10 characteristics shared by the world’s strongest brands and constructs a report to help managers to think about their brand’s performance.
"The report card can help you identify areas that need improvement, recognize areas in which your brand is strong, and learn more about how your particular brand is configured." - Kevin Keller
The characteristics outlined by Keller are the backbone of a successful brand strategy, and improving them should be every marketer's top priority.
Marketers who build strong brands use these report cards to clarify, implement, and communicate their marketing strategy in the boardroom.
The brand report card can be used by new marketing consultants, agencies or managers when starting at a new company to quickly assess the strengths and weaknesses of the brand.
Because they will lack experience with the company, the brand report card should also be filled out by all the current members of the marketing team. The resulting scores can be combined to give the new manager a good sense of the strengths and challenges of the brand.
The brand report card exercise can then be repeated once a year to measure the progress on improving areas of concern.
