It is tempting to compare your brand to others when choosing which metrics to track – but comparison often leads to you measuring the wrong things and stalling growth.
Shakespeare once wrote, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” However, if Shakespeare had grown up in my hometown of Whyalla, South Australia, that second line might have been, “Thou art more scorching, and more blistering.” Not quite as complimentary…
As normal as Shakespeare’s inclination to wax poetic is so is our desire to compare our own brands’ performance with, well, just about anything really. Competitors are often an easy place to turn to in order to satisfy that urge. Examples of competitor-based metrics strategy include:
The Cheerleader: where you try to emulate the biggest brand in the category, aka the ‘They got that score, we can too!‘ approach. Note: this is best employed while alternating star jumps and claps.
The Hercule Poirot: where you draw on your detective skills to work out why brands grew and echo any rising metrics for other growing brands, aka the ‘Aha, growth indicator detected, so let’s copy that!‘ approach.
The Chameleon: where you co-opt scores achieved by an aspirational brand from another category and aspire to look like them, aka the ‘We want to be the Patagonia of yogurts!‘ approach.
The (everything tastes like) Chicken: where you draw averages or top quartile benchmarks from a large database of brands without any consideration to whether other brands have been employing best practice aka the ‘Let’s aim for mediocrity and celebrate doing a bit better than it!‘ approach.
The Optimist: where you select a positive quality and try to score the highest on this, aka the ‘What the world needs now, is <insert favourite emotion>, sweet <insert favourite emotion>’, approach. Note: This one is best sung.
However, focusing on other brands can be risky. Professor Scott Armstrong of The Wharton School, showed that managers who focused on beating rivals rather than their own profitability caused long term issues for the company. Focusing on other brands, even successful ones, can mislead when you don’t know the details on how they got there. You can misinterpret the cause of success, and fixate on the wrong metric, leading to poor decisions. Even with the right metrics, goal setting can be compromised. A smaller brand might set unrealistic expectations, while a bigger brand sets the soft goals that breeds complacency.
Yes, your marketing mix model might give you numbers to work with, but it needs to have the right data to do so.
An alternative is to set goals that improve marketing practice as well as performance. Here are some metrics with objectives from sources other than competitors/other brands.
Read the full article in Marketing Week.