Over the past decade, brand has played an increasingly prominent role in the success of a company; but brand-building today looks markedly different than decades past, and has long been challenging for leaders to master given its often intangible nature. What used to be an aesthetically-led concept, typically reserved for product and consumer-facing businesses, is now a critical business asset for every company to cultivate, track, and grow.
Building a remarkable brand is foundational to building a remarkable company. But tangible guidance and measures of success have been lacking to date, making it elusive for leaders to gauge progress. In an effort to distill and codify the best practices we have learned through investing in break-out brands over the past decade, we are introducing new tools to quantify brand strength and provide actionable insights over time: the Brand Power Score, powered by the FRIEND Framework.
Forerunner: who are we?
Forerunner is a venture capital firm dedicated to partnering with ambitious entrepreneurs who are building generation-defining brands across categories and business. By studying changes in people’s behavior and mindset, we project how needs might shift as people seek solutions for critical problems and new aspirations.
Since Forerunner’s inception in 2012, we’ve invested in a roster of break-out brands — before they broke out:
The score can be leveraged on a longitudinal basis to reflect progress across the six dimensions, and the trend of a brand's overall Brand Power Score.
How do you calculate the Brand Power Score?
Consumers are asked whether they strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree with a given statement for each dimension of the FRIEND Framework. For each of the six statements, the difference between the percentage of respondents who have a positive perception (strongly agree and agree) and those who do not (disagree or strongly disagree) nets individual scores for each dimension. The Brand Power Score is the average of all six scores.
To get your Brand Power Score, head to our SurveyMonkey template to run the consumer survey and interpret your results. You can survey the general population and/or customers through your own channels. Then, once the survey results are in, our downloadable Excel file will help you calculate your Brand Power Score from your raw survey results. All results are only shared to companies, and not shared with Forerunner.
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