The Brand Upward Yield Score® (BUY Score®) -
The Second-Most Reliable Indicator of a Company's Ability to Grow and Be Profitable
The single-most reliable indicator of a company's ability to grow and be profitable is real customer loyalty and engagement metrics.
Our metrics have proven out time and again in B2B and B2C categories all over the world. Our questionnaire has a test/re-test reliability of .93 from National Probability Samples in the US and UK. Independent validations in ten categories found brand rankings based on our metrics correlated with actual, corporate profitability in a range of 0.83 to 0.901. Our entire process has been vetted by the research experts, The Advertising Research Foundation.
Our loyalty and engagement-based assessments have very, very high correlations with consumer behavior in the marketplace and, egregious corporate mismanagement notwithstanding, correlate highly with profitability. Why not? Loyalty = $. But let's not kid each other. If they were simple to calculate, everyone would be doing it.
In the absence of real engagement and loyalty metrics, we have created a metric called a Brand Upward Yield Score, or a BUY Score, for short.
While not providing leading-indicator assessments, it can provide you with a positive-indicator of brand success (or failure) that can be used to identify relative ROI.
The BUY Score is an aggregate assessment of four, key brand measures including:
- Brand image,
- Likelihood to purchase,
- An indication of how much they like the brand, and
- Likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague.
For those of you familiar with the Net Promoter® score, which attempts to measure the talk-value generated by a brand, the BUY Score includes that aspect but also incorporates three other critical measures — giving the marketer a score four times as powerful as the Net Promoter.
The total of the ratings on the four scales is multiplied by 2.5. Rated outside the context of advertising or media or another marketing scenario, the resultant number represents the brand's positive-indicator benchmark. It is then possible to use that benchmark to calculate pre-post ratios, not unlike the traditional Price/Earnings Ratios, with an equation that looks like this:
So, if your Brand BUY Score benchmark is 70, and you test initiative A and initiative B, and initiative A results in a brand evaluation of 80, your BUY Score equation would look like this:
On the other hand, suppose initiative B resulted in brand evaluation of 92, your BUY Score would then look like this:
Which ROI would you like to see?
In the interests of fair disclosure and an unwillingness to disappoint, we remind you that this is merely a positive-indicator ROI assessment. Unlike real loyalty and engagement-based measures, a BUY Score is an indicator of brand returns. It is not predictive and does not simply "translate" into "Initiative B will produce 31% return on the effort." Outside of real loyalty and engagement metrics, very few do. Nor does it offer the granularity a brand needs to develop nuanced strategy and communications efforts. Would that it were that easy.
But the BUY Score can be built into your marketing models and it can provide a comparative option for assessing market, media, and communication effects. We invite you to contact us to help integrate these, and our leading-indicator metrics, into your current efforts.
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