In the new era of branding the way that brands are being built is completely different and measurements of your success or failure is absolutely critical to success. But the ways that brands are measured is still stuck in the old era. We recently left a meeting where we were debriefed about 150 slides based on some brand tracking and 20 of us left the meeting and we didn't know whether we'd succeeded or failed. - And that just can't carry on, that is unacceptable. So we've paired everything down to the absolute nub of what you need to know, in terms of brand success. How well is your brand aligned. And it's built on the new principals of brand building.

We've called it the Brand Alignment Monitor and it does exactly as it says on the tin. This is the logo I would like to have used - it's the BAM! but of course we can't use that, we've turned in into something much more professional and as you can see in the the logo there are three elements to it. The BAM is the Brand Alignment Monitor, it simply measures how well your brand is aligned and what you need to do about it to make it more aligned and more successful. We've built this on years of experience of quantitative research and just general knowledge of how brands align themselves to build in the various components of this. And we've partnered with a company called CI Research in Wilmslow who've helped us with the mechanics and the principles and actually the delivery of it.

The BAM is built in the new era of brand building principles. If brands are built through 360 degrees, you simply have to measure them through 360 degrees. If they're built through thousands of gestures you have to measure more than one, which is advertising and also its based on the absolute principle that differentiation wins. Three, very simple principles running through everything that we're doing. And it's got three samples and this is very basic, but very important.

The first two fairly self-explanatory. The first one - you need to know how successful your are with your customers.

The second one there - The Market. The Market we interpret as the customers of your competitors, but also of all those other areas in which your brand is being influenced and affected and that might be amongst the media, it might be amongst intermediaries, anybody or anything that's got influence on the success or otherwise of your brand. Really important, that gives you a bigger understanding of how well your brands doing.

And thirdly and critically to this is the internal audience, generally this will be your staff. They are so important because they know in advance what's happening - and we've got lots of proof which shows that if things are going badly they'll know five or six months before this leaks out to the customers. It is absolutely been proven many a time that the insides of brands leak out, so therefore if you cut off at source, sometimes you don't need to get to the bad bit when it gets to your customers and your bottom line. Three samples which really give you a 360 degree view of how aligned your brand is and how successful it is. And there are three core measurements to the BAM.

The first one is the Brand Standing - very simply using a very simple technique we will tell you how near or how far away you are from achieving your desired brand positioning and your desired brand values, and you'll get that amongst those three samples - because it may be very different from your customers, from your non-customers and your staff. So very simple scores tell you what your Brand Standing is. And of course if you're doing well fantastic - and if you're doing badly you need to find out why. So the next part of the BAM is the diagnosis. If were to work with anybody the first thing we would to do would be to develop the Brand Vision is to work out what the big things we have to do to deliver this vision we call them Brand Critical Success Factors and we would have measures against each of those brand critical success factors. Again, very simple scores, to tell what's working and what isn't working. So immediately you see an issue, you can unravel the whole diagnosis element of the BAM and see what's actually happening. And of course the final bit, it's pointless doing all of that if you don't know the effect that has on the action that customers and the market will take. What are their levels of advocacy what's is their propensity to purchase, simple things like that.

So let's look at one quick example - This is the Brand Standing element of the BAM for cities. So what we've got down the left hand side here is a number of cities, their vision, we know some of these we know are true, some of those we've surmised and then their net alignment scores on the right hand side. And some really interesting things emerge:

Firstly, let's look at Liverpool - Liverpool overall is trying to become the cultural city. It's net alignment score overall in the UK is + 4 very low, but amongst it's residents it's really achieved that vision 49 a net alignment score of plus 49 amongst visitors it's customers it's only 8, and minus 46 amongst non-visitors. So you can see there Liverpool is positioning itself as a cultural city, it's achieving it with it's residents, but not achieving it elsewhere. Now, if we are looking at this in some detail here we would open up the diagnosis element and find out why. And we kind of know that because we know what their Brand Critical Success factors are.

Let's look at Blackpool here it's trying to become the beach resort with a city vibe - very negative scores. It's got a plan to change that. But it's a fifteen year plan and that over time they will want to see those scores moving in a positive direction. And overall here you can see just how different some of these scores are, depending on the sample and generally how low they are, a lot of them are red a lot of them are negative and it's only cities like Bath which are scoring really high there on 52 amongst residents and York which is 70 amongst residents, which is scoring scores which we would consider were in the very high scores, and of course York seems to be delivering with a plus 64 score amongst visitors.

The other point here is that some of these visions here that the cities have adopted are more compelling and more realistic than others, which opens a whole other can of worms. But you can see very simply here just how the BAM might work.

And here's another quick example not looking at a whole sector here, we have got the whole data for this whole sector, but let's just look at one bank which is NatWest. Now NatWest is trying to be the bank that goes further to help you. This is our hypothetical Brand Vision, but it's all based on helpfulness. Now just look here at its Standing Scores within the BAM. Overall minus 2, but look at the other scores within the sample, amongst its current customers minus 14. Now bear in mind we've got brands, retail brands, leisure brands who score 60 and 70 amongst their current customers, which are world class scores. NatWest aligning to the bank that goes further to help you - minus 14. Amongst the market, the general market it's higher than that but it's only just positive and worryingly for NatWest amongst staff, it's minus 2. But just look at the effect it has here on advocacy, the action scores for NatWest. Advocacy is a really critical part of the action output from the BAM amongst its customers we have a plus score for NatWest of +20, which is low, by comparison to other sectors that we deal in, but is actually quite high in the banking sector. But you can see there the one that shines out massively in this sector is First Direct with +78 which is a huge score and well into world class. Now we don't have the Brand Critical Success Factors for NatWest, but we do have some diagnosis which may help work out what might be going wrong.

We've got these in the form of word clouds, the size of the words indicative of how frequently there were mentioned. We ask people to shout out words that they associated with the NatWest brand and here they are on this word cloud. The bigger the word is indicative of how frequently it was said and as you can see here Friendliness, Convenience are the big words, but helpfulness is there as well. So illustrating there that Helpfulness is coming through for NatWest. But let's just have a look at the Halifax, you can see here that Friendly really futures highly but so does helpful and they are very much associated with mortgages. So you can see here that actually that territory of helpfulness, Halifax is also in there - and you can even see it here with HSBC, which is dominated by Reliable, International and Global - Local, which is the stance they take in advertising, but Helpful there is also strong. In fact, Helpfulness featured in all the word clouds in all the banks we looked at, which could indicate that helpfulness is absolutely the high gene factor and trying to position yourself as the most helpful is a very difficult ask. Having said that though it might be a very rich territory should NatWest be able to gain it. And there are other elements within the BAM which illustrate he's moving in the right direction.

So that basically is the BAM, simple scores taken with customers, non-customers, people within the whole of the buying system and an internal audience. It gives you the Standing of your brand, a diagnosis of what's working and what isn't working and then also the effect that that has on the bottom line, the action scores. I've the mentioned the simplicity of this all the way through and the reason is all the scores are given as scores that are devised using the net promoters scores. We just write statements that align with your vision and your values and your brand critical success factors and ask people to agree or disagree to them.

You know how this works 9 and 10 is agree out of 10, six and below out of 10 is disagree, 7 and 8 is passive, so you get scores out of 100. A net alignment score of about 60 or 50 is very good. Something in the region of 30 is kind of average, anything below that we start looking at some problems. Very very simple, allows you to benchmark, allows you to plot progress, and allows you to work out exactly what is and what isn't working, so that you can have an impact on those bottom line scores - those action scores.

Now there's one more principal attached to this, it is very, very cost effective. We think it's about a third of the price of most general, big brand tracking studies that we've seen.

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