Introducing a new measure of an employer’s brand strength that is more inclusive than Net Promoter Score.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?

If this question looks familiar, then you’re probably already familiar with Net Promoter Score® (NPS)¹. For 20 years, it has been a bellwether metric for quantifying customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. With one easy-to-answer question, organizations of all sizes have been able to calculate the health of their customer engagement with a remarkably simple formula:

(Brand Promoters (scores of 9-10) − Brand Detractors (scores of 0-6)) ÷ Sample Size × 100

While the NPS formula is highly valuable in distilling customer sentiment down to a single number, the strategy team at Aloysius Butler and Clark (AB&C) felt we could develop a more robust measure of brand loyalty, especially in terms of recruiting and retaining talent. We put our 50-plus years of experience with qualitative branding research to use to develop a more complete measure of an employer’s brand strength, one that includes audience satisfaction, perception of employer reputation and NPS. It’s a calculation we call Employer Brand Strength Index™ (EBSI).

While it has the ease of use and simplicity of the traditional NPS, our proprietary EBSI measurement tool brings in more metrics that are tailored to individual organizations and their specific industries. Our measurement includes perceptions of current employees as well as external audiences, allowing us to benchmark external assessments of employer brands against internal reflections of employment experiences. Organizations are able to include their NPS and employment reputation into a measure that allows them to monitor the success of what is being promoted in the market.

And with the introduction of factor weights measured with a five-point Likert scale (see table below), we can refine the EBSI to help calculate overall employer brand health.

The EBSI can be used as a reliable predictor of employer brand strength and employee engagement. The inclusion of the EBSI in a recruiter’s toolbox provides talent acquisition and talent engagement teams a comprehensive additional key performance metric. The EBSI is a benchmark measure that should be reviewed over time to adjust operational practices and recruitment marketing messages to continually improve an organization’s employment brand to attract prospective employees and enhance employee loyalty.

1. In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, Inc. created the NPS metric.

As the world slowly but surely starts to open up again, travel enthusiasts everywhere are itching to get out and explore their own backyard. Whether it’s a day trip to a nearby county or a weekend getaway to a city, the concept of being a “local tourist” has never been more appealing. In fact, according to a recent survey of 500 people living in the Philadelphia region, 77% of people said that “traveling with their family or a group” was the best thing about being a local tourist.¹

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AB&C recently conducted a survey of consumers in the five-county Philadelphia region, Southern New Jersey and Northern Delaware. The survey covered topics including upcoming local travel plans and preferences, anticipated day and overnight trips, key catalysts for deciding to visit new places, as well as preferred media for learning about destinations and attractions. Below is a preview of the survey that was shared at the Philadelphia Business Journal’s “Tourism Turning Point: Growing the Philadelphia Region’s Travel Market” seminar. (Note: A detailed analysis of survey results will follow in the weeks ahead).

View a preview of the report (PDF, 1MB)

Research provides insights on attitudes and preferences for future travel.

More than three-quarters (78%) of travelers from Greater Philadelphia are very or somewhat likely to travel in 2022, with 69% stating they are likely to visit a regional destination within 250 miles of their home. This data comes from a travel survey of 200 consumers living within 80 miles of Philadelphia. AB&C conducted the survey in January 2022, using Pollfish, a national quantitative online survey platform.Read full post...

In January 2016, I wrote a blog titled “Four Marketing Resolutions for 2016.” I cited research identifying that “people who write down their specific resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t make specific resolutions.”[1] So I made my marketing resolutions public:
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By David Brond, Elizabeth Cohen and Linda McAleer

Multiple articles have been written about the important role parents play in their child’s college decision. Most higher education marketers and enrollment professionals agree that a parent’s powerful influence in guiding high school students throughout the college application and admission process is often unmatched by any other person.
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Amid the current coronavirus situation, some organizations may be tempted to implement a “wait and see” approach to marcom. However, now is not the time to cut branding or market research efforts. For healthcare organizations there is an obvious need to focus short-term priorities on the Coronavirus pandemic and its day-to-day impact on human and financial resources, operations, patient care and safety. Read full post...

While many healthcare providers have been late adopters of digital marketing (as compared to other industries), it is fair to say that, as of 2018 it is now a cornerstone of most healthcare marketing programs. And that prominence comes from success and lessons learned—some good, some not so good—about both general and digital marketing.

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Marketing dashboards are an essential deliverable for any marketing team. Senior leaders want to know what they are getting for their investment in marketing, and how marketing will advance their strategic plan. And for marketers, it is important to document how effective you were in achieving your stated goals. So, where to begin?

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Inevitably at some point during your healthcare marketing career you will be faced with bringing a new brand to market. As you do, it is critical to stay focused on the strategic and business objectives of your organization, while also protecting the equity of your brand. The following scenarios describe bringing a new brand to a market, assuming you currently have standing or brand value. The goal in both cases is to leverage the equity of all the brands to enhance your brand, differentiate you from competitors and better serve your customers.

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Over the past four-plus decades, AB&C has worked with some of the most premier healthcare systems across this country—large and small—and we greatly value those relationships. But great agency-client relationships just don’t happen; they take true commitment by both parties to be successful. And over the years, we have learned what makes a great working relationship and want to share that knowledge with you, because agencies, while a source of expense, are also an investment, and have a key impact on your organization and your ability to meet patient and provider needs, delivery quality care and build your brand.

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In my experience as a hospital chief marketing officer (CMO) and in working at AB&C with healthcare CMOs, I’ve found a number of attributes that serve a person well in this role. On Innovation Enterprise, which provides leading-edge ideas and information on a variety of key business channels, Rose Johnstone identifies a number of these attributes from the business world that apply to the healthcare industry.

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Healthcare organizations have always struggled with measuring return on marketing investment (ROMI), mostly because of multiple systems of data collection that don’t speak to one another. But with the advent of new “tools,” that challenge is getting easier — if you have the building blocks in place.

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If you followed a systematic approach to build a new brand (or refreshed an existing one), you started with discovery research. You then developed a brand mantra to inform how your brand would be articulated to internal audiences and the outside world. Finally, you created or refined the outward expressions, such as the name, mark and colors.

All of this hard work was done in preparation to share your brand with stakeholders and customers. This is when the rubber hits the road. It’s important to invest as much time, and as many resources, into properly socializing and managing your brand as it is to develop, create and refine it.

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As branding experts, we have developed our own vocabulary for what we do and how we help organizations define and present themselves to consumers. We use terminology like “brand architecture,” “platform,” “positioning,” “promise,” “proof point,” “personality,” “identity” and “tag line” to describe how we create, communicate and control the attributes of a brand. An important but often overlooked step in the process of building or revitalizing a brand is the development of a brand mantra.

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