What is Brand Intelligence?

There is no question that data is critical for decision-making. And nowadays, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of data.  The problem is – getting the right data, at the right time. And then being able to transform it into insights that help you make the right decisions.

In a 2019 Forrester report “Why Marketers Can’t Ignore Data Quality,” 37% of marketers said that the biggest consequence of poor data quality was wasted spend.  In a world where marketers estimate that 26% of their budget is wasted (Rakuten, 2018), and that budget is increasingly targeted for cuts, data and insight quality is a five-alarm-fire press-the-red-button warning-warning critical issue. Marketers just can’t afford to waste a dime right now. They need answers, not guesses.

But data and insight quality continues to be a difficult issue, especially as the CMO remit continues to expand beyond marketing to include driving alignment and KPIs with sales, product, customer experience, technology, and finance teams.  Today, marketing leaders typically rely on surveys and brand tracking, which can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for B2B organizations. For more rapid insights, proxy channel metrics such as social listening are often used to drive strategic decision-making, but this can lead to blind spots with serious implications.  And finally, some organizations attempt to cobble together channel metrics into homegrown views of overall marketing impact and brand health, but this requires extensive people and budget resources that most companies don’t have. 

According to the Learning Experience Alliance 2021/2022 Martech Report, over 23% of marketing budgets are going towards technology today. But with an estimated 9,932 martech solutions available, 1,346 exclusively focused on data, the problem doesn’t seem to be getting better – if anything it’s getting worse as the proliferation of tools and data increases. 

This is ultimately a fight for marketing survival and has led to the creation of the Brand Intelligence category.  Brand intelligence leverages software and services to transform brand, integrated marketing, channel, and competitive data into actionable insights that inform an organization’s marketing decisions.

As a reference, think of the acceleration in business insights and decision-making that came from the emergence of business intelligence.  With the explosion of digital transformation initiatives also came an explosion of data, and subsequent challenges in managing and understanding that data to support business decisions.  Technology evolved to handle massive amounts of data, with relational databases that not only stored the data but enabled complex analysis of data relationships and the generation of rich insights. Data discovery and visualization tools were developed for non-IT users, democratizing those insights for the entire business.  Business intelligence revolutionized how businesses operated and how decisions were made. And as organizations embraced digital transformation initiatives, strong business intelligence capabilities and competencies became truly business critical.

Brand intelligence is enabling that same kind of step change for marketing insights and marketing decision-making. 

Let’s start with the data. Brand intelligence is fueled by vast amounts of data on how your brand and marketing efforts are performing in the marketplace.  Data such as

• Real-time audience signals (e.g. search behavior, social interactions, and sentiment)
• Strategic signals such as advertising spend and content & messaging approaches
• Business performance signals such as revenue and employee support

The challenge is that this data is locked away in countless siloes – different channels and point solutions, different teams, 3rd party data vendors.  This is where the analytics comes in. Brand intelligence breaks down those siloes and applies advanced analytics to relate the data points and generate multi-faceted insights such as brand health, marketing effectiveness, trends, predicted outcomes, and ROI analysis.  

And finally, there is insight discovery and actioning. Brand intelligence tools enable every marketer in the organization to discover and explore insights relevant to their role, from a product marketer looking to improve messaging and content to a channel owner wanting to improve engagement and conversion to a brand leader focused on improving brand health. With the right brand intelligence tools, marketers can have more confidence in the actions they take to drive revenue, improve marketing ROI, and build the brand. And, with a unified source of brand intelligence insights and the right tools to access them, organizations can drive greater alignment across sales, marketing, and product, which can lead to faster revenue growth and higher profitability (19% and 15%, respectively, according to a recent Forrester report). 

Just as we saw business intelligence rise to become a business-critical part of any organization’s IT stack and staffing strategy, brand intelligence must become an equally integral part of every organization’s strategy to drive growth.  With meaningful, actionable insights gleaned from huge amounts of data, and a common language and understanding to drive action across business stakeholders, marketers can unlock exponential value from their marketing investments.