A good brand analytics program links brand management to business performance. Brand analytics has the potential to be used as a strategic management tool. If you are currently satisfied with your brand analytics program, you may want to answer the questions below,

• Can your program help you benchmark your brands performance against your competitors?
• Based on the current program, can you identify the week nodes of your brand before they turn into a business problem?
• Can your analytics program suggest and tip you with brand building areas to focus on?
• Does your analytics help you understand how the brand is performing against customer expectations and perceptions?

If majority of the answers to the above questions are Yes, then your brand analytics program is definitely worth the time and money spent. Else research further for a more suitable program.

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Management Paradise Logo

What is ManagementParadise.com?

ManagementParadise.com is one of its kind startup that creates MBAs Online and boasts a member base of over 100 thousand members. The community educates aspirants, students or professionals alike and provides a new interface to management education. This startup has a CULT status in Bachelors of  Management Studies section and is said to have revolutionized management education in India.

Our Advices

1. ManagementParadise.com is currently using a paid community building CMS called V-Bulletin. This extremely efficient community software uses revolutionary advanced and intellectual programming to build a strong and efficient community based forum. Although it has suited ManagementParadise.com well since its inception, it is now time to switch to a customized layout to churn out a better user interface which will leverage on user interactivity. The current V-bulletin software does not suit the criteria for a huge management education community.  The attributes and features of the software, in spite of various available plugins, are more general than specific to educational community, which restricts targeted user interactions to a great extent. A better user interactivity set along with some uniquely  targeted features should turnaround the community and boost a greater value creation for its consumers.

2.1 We are concerned about the positioning strategy for ManagementParadise.com. It lacks a Brand Essence and Promise. A brand essence is a short three or maximum four word message (generally personizing the brand with a ‘quality’) describing what a particular brand is all about. A possible brand essence for ManagementParadise.com could be, ‘Ultimate Management Education Online’.

2.2 ManagementParadise.com should also have a slogan to make a brand promise. A Brand Promise needs to be carefully formed to make sure it appeals to the target market. A possible Brand Promise could be a message it has been already sharing for sometime now, ‘Everything that Touches Management Education is Our Kingdom.’

note: Brand Essence and Promise are closely related to each other. It is advisable to read more about them before jumping to conclusions.

2.3 The logo also concerns us a bit. The founders appear to have spent some cheap bucks on designing the Logo for ManagementParadise.com. Although the Logo, seems to have a targeted message, it is neither clear with its idea nor appearance. Logo’s are meant to be simplistic, clear, visible and more importantly communicable.

The logo has also been through a series of changes over the past couple of years. This is a perfect Branding mistake. An inconsistent logo does not allow users to get acquainted with the brand image of ManagementParadise.com and alienates the current consumer base by passing a inconsistent message across.

3. ManagementParadise.com also needs to protect its brand against imitations. This is a start-up which has managed to scale good heights and there are some obvious expected counterfeiters around who wouldn’t bother using the brand name to supply closely related information. It is hence advisable to book some misspelled domains (e.g managemntpradise.com) and other extensions (.org, .net, etc) for the brand name ‘Management Paradise’ and redirect all visitors entering such domains to ManagementParadise.com. This would also help acquiring lost consumers.

These and a few more privately specific advices are in-store for ManagementParadise.com. We are open and invite the management of this brand to express their views on our advices and discuss their Branding Strategies with us in person.

Please feel free to comment.

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If you have a brand you’d like us to evaluate and are a member of Webalue.com, let us know the problems  (info [ a t] webalue.com) you face and we’ll study your brand to come up with our recommendations.

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First Hypothesis

Based on stronger traffic figures, MobileGyan.com should be generating comparatively higher revenue than ConnectMobiles.com.

Second Hypothesis

Based on the stronger Brand Score many would presume that ConnectMobiles.com generates greater revenue than MobileGyan.com.

Investigation

Which one of the above two hypotheses is correct? We weren’t quite sure about the best way to approach the hypotheses derived while building the part two of this case study. But after a brainstorming session, we concluded.  “What else, other than the actual revenue figures, would serve as the perfect myth-busters?”  So we extracted the financial statement of earnings of both the businesses. Our findings, successfully busted one of the hypotheses.

Source: ConnectMobiles.com (info@connectmobiles.com) and MobileGyan.com (info@mobilgyan.com)

From the above revealed revenue stream statistics it is clearly evident that, ConnectMobiles.com, despite having a lower traffic, enjoys greater revenue than Mobilegyan.com. This suggests that considering Brand Analytics or Brand Score as the ultimate performance indicator makes more practical sense. But we do reckon that a few questions would arise related to the above revenue generation streams for brands and the final result of the investigation.

What causes Brand Analytics to nail metrics parallel to the revenue streams of brands? And what influences some brands [ConnectMobiles.com] to have a better Brand Score than rival brands [Mobilegyan.com].

The source and interactivity of the traffic may matter. Your daily external web analytics statistics may have the answer. If the referrer analysis of both the brands is to be compared, it provides some answers to the above questions.

ConnectMobiles.com Referrers Analysis

ConnectMobiles.com Referrer Analysis (Monthly)

Mobilegyan.com Referrers Analysis

MobileGyan.com Referrer Analysis (Monthly)

Mobilegyan.com has a commendable lead over ConnectMobiles.com when it comes to traffic acquired via Search Engines, but needs to redistribute its efforts

Although both enjoy a heavy traffic via Search engines, there is a considerable distinctiveness in sources of traffic. Direct Entry (Visitors entering the site by directly entering the URL or domain name of the website), for example, which signifies that people are aware of a particular entity’s existence and wish to avail themselves with further or more services from the entity, is a very effective Brand Performance indicator. ConnectMobiles.com lavishly enjoys a good 20% of its traffic through Direct Entry as compared to 2.99% held by MobileGyan.com.

ConnectMobiles.com also appears to be involved in Email Marketing Programs as a part of its strategy which provides them a further source of distinctive as well as targeted consumer base.

The age of a Brand also matters. It is usually unanimously agreed upon that the age of a brand goes parallel with the level of trust consumers develop gradually and ultimately increasing the sales potential.

Conclusion

Although Traffic stats emit a load full of important marketing insights, they are not a data to relax peacefully with. Often relying on traffic stats resembles errors committed by some marketing managers who rely exclusively on sales data to predict their market strategy. The Australian Vine industry, is said to be in dire straits for the very reason (Branding Strategy Insider, 2009). We need more research centric data to execute important marketing decisions.

As we approach the end of this three part case study (See Part one and two) , what  needs to be extracted here is that no data can be important enough to be solely relied upon. In today’s complex market, we need further insights and quicker information that help us process business strategies at lightining speeds with greater transparency of the current as well as future market. More importantly these insights need to be based on credible factors.

On the Internet, analytics programs do the job for marketing data. Brand Analytics is one such marketing metrics that promises to provide well-aligned information based on other legitimate KPIs. Through the results of this case study, not only is it proved that Brand Analytics is a better reliable performance indicator than Traffic, but it is also expected to possess greater potential and importance in the upcoming Internet marketing horizon.

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Monthly Traffic Statistics

ConnectMobiles.com

MobileGyan.com

Insights Accumulated

1. Mobilegyan.com receives more returning visitors than Connectmobiles.com

2. Mobilegyan.com enjoys 60% more traffic over Connectmobiles.com with Unique visits and about 7 times more  returning visits.

First Hypothesis

Mobilegyan.com receives greater traffic and loyalty than ConnectMobiles.com and hence is a better or stronger Brand

MobileGyan.com should be generating comparatively higher revenue than Connectmobiles.com.

Monthly Brand Analytics

ConnectMobiles.com

Mobilegyan.com

Insights Accumulated

1. The average Webalue.com Brand Score generated for MobileGyan.com is 0.92 while that of ConnectMobiles.com is 1.20.

2. MobileGyan.com has a slightly growing Brand Score trend while Connectmobiles.com has a mixed trend.

Second Hypothesis

ConnectMobiles.com showcases a higher and thus better Brand Score than MobileGyan.com.

Based on the stronger Brand Score many would presume that ConnectMobiles.com generates greater revenue than MobileGyan.com.

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The two hypothesis have been formed. In the upcoming post we will present a brief discussion and reveal the actual revenue numbers for both the sample brands to determine which one the above formed hypothesis is true.

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Brand Analytics

The word ‘Analytics’ may sound merely statistical and number-crunching to many online marketing managers; especially those who probably rely and execute their business decisions based on insights derived from ‘Analytics’; more commonly known as ‘Traffic Analytics’. But there is more to analytics than just the number of visitors a website receives. Traffic of a website is an incomplete performance indicator. Factors like, traffic source diversity, exposure, loyalty and maturity of the business, which together form Brand Analytics, are a must, either while taking important marketing decisions or setting up a business strategy. Voice of Consumers is another branding factor often under-rated among marketers either because of their inefficiency in setting-up a consumer reaction recording infrastructure or probably because they are simply lazy enough.

But despite the obvious importance of the above branding factors, the traffic of a website is still the most commonly used and relied-upon marketing data among marketers (though many, but not all, traffic analytics systems provide a set of few branding factors). So we decided to conduct this case-study to determine which one of the two (brand analytics or traffic analytics) is more credible.

This post is a part one of a Case Study. The case compares brand and traffic metrics between two brands (ConnectMobiles.com and Mobilegyan.com) competing in the same industry. The purpose of this case study is to differentiate and determine the credibility of insights produced between traffic and brand analytics.

Note: We wish to thank both ConnectMobiles.com and MobileGyan.com for granting us access to their private company statistics.

Details

-  Brands Participating:

ConnectMobiles.com
ConnectMobiles.com is a Nokia Portal providing tips and tricks, reviews and latest news about most Nokia Phones in the market.
Number of Employees including Founder: 5

Mobilegyan.com
MobileGyan.com is a technology blog dedicated to provide information about all kinds of GSM Phones.
Number of Employees including Founder: 3

- Industry of Competition:
Shopping  –> Consumer Electronics

In the follow-up post (Part Two) of this Case Study we will expose the Traffic and Brand Analytics of the above mentioned brands and extract insights and form hypothesis for both Traffic and Brand Analytics. (Follow up within the next week). Stay tuned for the next post on Webalue.com, either through your to-dos list or by signing up for email updates.

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