For October, we had Brian Aubert from Ohio State University Marketing talk about brand measurement on a shoestring. “On a shoestring? We are talking about the Ohio State University, right?” you might ask, but as we learned back at our August event from Brian’s compatriot Elaine, OSU is a big complicated place with a lot of different units to serve and a lot of different messages to get a across with limited marketing resources.

It’s OK to be a Hufflepuff

We know that brands are incredibly valuable, and OSU is no exception to that — so how do you measure brand health?? It would be nice to have a single number with a red or green change arrow, but as Brian’s journey has informed us it’s a long road to that kind of simple-seeming metric. Perhaps if you are like Brian’s previous employer Chase with giant piles of cash and backrooms filled with statistics PhDs it can be a little easier, but it’s a challenge for anyone.

Brian laid out some of the components of OSU’s brand measurement strategy including:

• Comparing OSU to benchmarks: both highly comparative (let’s beat Michigan in Twitter shares too!) and aspirational… but maybe not too aspirational.
• Getting visibility into social activity by segment. OSU is a brand with a very disparate set of “products”. Teasing out individual units from athletics and big news events is a tricky task requiring a lot of hard work.
• Moving into more survey-based research.

OSU has upgraded “the 3 Rs” to 4: Reputation, Recognition, Relevance, Resonance.

OSU’s brand health measurement is still in its nascent stages, so at the end of the talk we then had an extended Q&A session when alums and non-alums alike got to pepper Brian with good questions about how OSU got where they are with brand measurement and where they are going.

Thanks to Darin at Mixt Media for the livestream video!

Join us again in November when Jason Packer will give us an intro class on attribution!