Branding has recently become a subject of enormous interest to professionals. By way of recent example are the new streams of marketing and branding courses I have been engaged to teach to architects, chiropodists and naturopathic doctors.

Which brings us to a natural question that professionals considering a branding initiative may be grappling with:

Can the Return On Investment (ROI) of a branding initiative be measured?

Yes… but, unfortunately, the answer may not help be as helpful as you had hoped.

There are several complex calculations that can provide you with an indication of the net worth of your professional brand equity or the level of awareness your branding campaign has generated.

A more suitable, albeit less direct, approach would be to measure the impact a brand could make on the value of your customer base including its size, quality and level of loyalty. A value that is intuitive, believable and tangibly connected to the future of your practice.

Nick Wreden debates the idea of measuring ‘customer equity’ instead of brand equity in his creative, and at times humorous, article Branding’s Dirty Little Secret:

…brand equity has as much value to those interested in profitability and accountability as leeches and bleeding have to those focused on medical efficacy. But there is one brand value calculation that the CEO and CFO can embrace – customer equity.
Do brands have value? Absolutely. But attempting to measure this value through brand equity provides little benefit and distracts a company away from the task of retaining profitable customers. Ultimately, it is loyal customers- not a fallible calculation – who are responsible for brand value and sustainability. And that requires measurement of customer equity. As Frederick Reichheld pointed out in his landmark book, The Loyalty Effect: “Customer equity effectively explains success and failure in business”. The companies with the highest retention rates also earn the best profits. Relative retention explains profits better than market share, scale, cost position or any other variable associated with competitive advantage’.