Today, we’re unveiling something we’ve been working on behind the scenes for over a year, born out of hundreds of conversations with entrepreneurs and operators, in addition to primary research: the Brand Power Score, a new tool for quantitatively measuring brand impact. The Brand Power Score is powered by the FRIEND Framework, our new rubric for evaluating the key dimensions that make up a brand’s DNA. Companies of any stage or industry can find out their Brand Power Score through our partnership with SurveyMonkey to gain deeper insight on how they are resonating with consumers, and specifically where they might need to invest more to strengthen brand impact.
Brand has long been seen as the elusive, magnetic sixth sense of break-out businesses. It’s something that people often struggle to articulate or reliably gauge, but that they inevitably feel when it’s done well — and it can be an incredibly powerful conduit for people to act, share, and buy. Similarly, business builders can spend millions in an effort to build brand equity, but fumble when evaluating if they’re driving ROI or if progress is truly being made.
At Forerunner, we’ve invested in dozens of breakthrough brands back when they were just getting started: Glossier, Chime, Warby Parker, Ritual, The Farmer’s Dog, Hims&Hers, Away, Prose, OURA, Dollar Shave Club, and more. Through these experiences, we’ve learned a lot about the anatomy of what makes a great brand and business, no matter what stage the company may be at. Whether a consumer or enterprise SaaS business, a powerful brand goes hand-in-hand with driving outsized commercial success and lasting power. Ultimately, it’s not enough to have a beautiful logo or website; break-out brands have a unique combination of very human characteristics, where customers feel connected at a deeper level. Ultimately, this kind of brand impact allows a business to transform how it’s valued in markets and expand the very potential of their market at large.
We’ve been asked countless times about how we know if a brand is poised to break out. While some people chalk it up to some intangible artistic intuition, we believe there can be a more measured, holistic framework. We set out to create these tools for quantifying brand, gleaning what we’ve learned from years of conversations with marketing leaders and partnerships with generation-defining companies, combined with research on over 14,000 people across the US to validate our theses.
Our goal in publicly releasing the Brand Power Score is to transform what has historically been considered an amorphous, subjective part of business building into a measurable, actionable asset. Because it’s well-known that you cannot improve what you can’t or don’t measure.
The Brand Power Score is based on the FRIEND Framework, which represents the key dimensions that comprise brand impact — Feelings, Reliably, Identity, Experience, North Star, Differentiation. It stems from the concept that a great brand is akin to a great friend — they might not be perfect or be your best friend every single year, but they consistently show up in ways that characterize their strengths, values, and unique attributes. The Brand Power Score illuminates how measurements vary based on customers vs. non-customers, as well as insights on each dimension of the FRIEND Framework to provide granular, actionable learnings about where there are opportunities for improvement. For example, a company might thrive at Reliability and Differentiation, but score lower on North Star and Feelings, indicating potential for deeper investment in honing and expressing values, mission and vision, and tone of voice.
We’re putting out the Brand Power Score and FRIEND Framework into the world to give founders, CEOs, and operators better tools for building their brands, and to start a conversation about insightful new ways we can evaluate and invest in this critical, ever evolving business asset. We’re committed to continuing this research and evolving our efforts here, so brands can not just thrive, but stand the test of time.
Check out the Brand Power Score and FRIEND Framework — and we’re always eager to hear what people think: brandscore@forerunnerventures.com.