How to use Share of Search to measure and calculate success in building a strong brand.

As a company you have two assets that will make or break your company over time:

1) Your people – without them you have no products, no sales, no innovation, no financials for a CFO to manage, etc. 

2) Your brand – If the market, customers and consumers are not aware that you exist, if you have a bad reputation etc ,you will over time have a hard time attracting people, selling your products, entering new markets etc.

If you think about it, most other assets in a company have standardized ways to measure success, like economic metrics, quality metrics, returns of products, customer churn, etc.

For brands and human capital there are hundreds of alternatives but no standards.

I don’t know how to solve the metric for human capital but I have an idea for the brand, Share of Search.

Building a strong brand lies in four basic brand parameters, the branding (B) math formula: B (your brand)= p1 * c* p2*p3
-product (p1)
-communication (c)
-place (p2)
-price (p3)

Then success can be measured in how that results in a sustained interest for the brand (leading to higher margins, more sales, easier to recruit etc.

The easiest way to measure that interest is to use “search” as a metric since search is something we all do when we want to know something – we search on the net, a fantastic proxy for interest in something.

So in other words, if you are able to sustain a stable or growing Share of Search, you are creating a strong brand.