Brand equity – how can we find it, measure it and grow it when we’re going through a brand development?
But before that, let’s start at the beginning and let’s talk about brand development itself. So whatever’s led you here, if you’re about to embark on a brand development, then this is a real moment to enjoy. It’s sort of like Bilbo off on an adventure, leaving the safety of the shire to find and tackle every dated asset, every friction point that threatens Middle Earth, or your brand in this case. Sorry, is a little bit of a tortured metaphor.
But in all seriousness, the start of a brand development project should be a moment to embrace that adventurous spirit. It’s all about us seeing the art of the possible here. And by the way, there’s a little side note, yes, it does pain me slightly using a meme from the Hobbit when it’s so inferior to the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it does serve a pretty good purpose here.
So we’re going to let it slide just this once. But anyway, at this point in the project, we should have our adventurous spirit really locked in and we should be ready to hit the ground running.
The brand development dilemma
Unfortunately, pretty soon that initial excitement is hit by some pretty granular detail. And one of the most obvious, but sometimes sort of difficult things to untangle, is figuring out what’s actually going to change, what’s actually on the table when it comes to our brand development. Essentially, we’re gonna ‘keep it’ button or the ‘lose it’ button.
In actuality, there should probably be a third button in here, which is ‘evolve it’. And in most instances, unless this is a real kind of root and branch rebrand, you’re going to want to be hitting this button at least once or twice in any brand development process.
So how do we actually decide what stays, what goes and what evolves? There’s obviously lots of ways to measure whether a part of your existing brand is aligned with where you’re heading.
But somewhere in the process, there’s a good chance that this is going to get said: "Wait, we can’t touch that – It has too much equity!”.
That might sort of sound familiar to some of you. And firstly, this is a completely legitimate statement and genuinely, we ignore brand equity at our peril. The problem is that sometimes what we think is equity is actually sort of just nostalgia, or even just something that’s just been around for a really long time.
So today I just want to try and unpick brand equity a little bit more. I’m going to share a really simple framework that anyone can use to measure it, then run through a couple of examples where we’ve used this framework to identify where potential equity lies. And then use that as a platform to develop brands with the potential to build greater equity in the future.
What actually is brand equity? And… what isn’t
But let’s start by trying to define what brand equity actually is and also critically what it isn’t. So there’s a term that sort of gets chucked around quite a lot in our industry, but can sometimes feel a bit nebulous, a little bit hard to pin down. And if we can’t really define something, then trying to measure it is sort of nigh on impossible.
So start by talking about what it isn’t and brand equity isn’t just brand recognition, although that is part of it. But something could be recognised by 100% of your audience. But if it doesn’t create positive associations, then it’s not really brand equity.
It’s also not consistency, although again, consistency can help us build brand equity. And heritage and longevity, again, are always sort of regularly cited as proof of brand equity. But as sort of mentioned already, just because something’s been around for a really, really long time, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually serving your brand.
And sometimes these things can actually be holding you back. Also it doesn’t equate to financial investment. We spend lots of money on something, it can be a really strong argument to consider retaining an asset, particularly in the charity sector, where we know we have to be really sort of conscientious and cautious around our budgets. But having financial investment in something doesn’t in itself mean that it holds inherent value for us.
Then, last but not least, is internal affection. So when we’re using a brand every day, we naturally develop sort of strong feelings towards our brand. Sometimes these are good, sometimes they’re definitely not.
You know which aspects of your brand apply to each of these.
So don’t get me wrong, internal buying for any brand development is absolutely crucial, but it can also be a real blocker when we’re looking to make sort of really necessary changes if we’re only looking at things subjectively.
And again, just because everyone in your organisation knows and loves a certain aspect of your brand, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your audience does. They might, but they might not.
So what is brand equity then? So if we Google ‘brand equity’, we’ll get a bunch of different definitions, but at Red Stone, we tend to describe it along these lines, that brand equity is a mental short cut that makes people trust you, makes people choose you and makes people give to you, without you having to convince them from scratch every time.
When we’re developing or managing a brand, we want to create as many of these positive mental short cuts in our audiences’ minds as possible.
And then a final part in this definition is to remember that brand equity is cumulative. So a single asset or a single phrase might hold brand equity, but it’s a combination of all the things that you do and say, that makes up that decision to trust, choose, or give to you. So the more places we can start to build those mental short cuts and that brand equity, the better. So brand equity is about building those short cuts.
How do we measure whether they already exist?
So there’s a lot of different ways that we can measure brand equity. This might be most commonly through brand tracking, like YouGov or social listening.
At Red Stone, we’re really big believers in both these approaches and they do probably give us the sort of best long term indication of brand equity. But they can also be expensive and they take a significant amount of time to sort of yield a result.
So we’ve also developed a pretty simple sort of framework, but it’s based on the same methodology, that any brand of any size can use to get a pretty good read on where their brand equity might actually lie and provide a bit of a framework to help evolve brand essays to increase it over time.
The ‘Three Fs’
So we love a framework with a set of three and this framework is built around what we call the ‘Three Fs’. When you boil these things down, brand equity is generally a combination of these three things.
So familiarity, feeling and function. If a part of your brand gets a big green tick across all of these, then you’ve probably got some equity tied up in a specific asset, let’s break them down in a little bit more detail.
Familiarity
So first is familiarity. So this isn’t just about awareness or whether people have sort of seen your logo. It’s more about how much effort it takes for the brain to actually sort of process these things. So if we’re undertaking a discovery phase of part of a brand development or we’re surveying our audience, we want to ask a few kind of pointed questions.
So what do they know us for? Can they name any brand assets without seeing them? What do they immediately think of when they think of you?
If everyone says they can really kind of intricately describe your logo or colour without any kind of prompting, that’s probably going to be a pretty big tick for familiarity.
Feeling
The second F is feeling and feelings matter like a lot in branding. So familiarity and recognition is pretty useless if we have the wrong feeling attached to it.
So again, if we think about those mental short cuts and when they fire, what kind of baggage is sort of coming along with that? Do they instantly feel sort of trust or they feel warmth and relevance or do they feel sort of confusion or sort of indifference or maybe even suspicion? Obviously, these are things that we want to make sure we avoid.
And then crucially, do these feelings match the feelings of positive interactions with the organisation itself?
Function
Last but not least, is function. So this is something that sometimes gets missed and it’s probably not quite as glamorous as familiarity and feeling, but it is massively important.
So real brand equity is about removing friction. It’s about making it easier for our audience to remember us and to choose us. So these points of friction can be tiny, they can make sort of split second hesitations, but if an asset is actually actively helping smooth that process for us, then it’s functioning really well.
So that’s the basis of the framework and we can use these three Fs to measure any aspect of our brand and get a really good steer on the things that are adding value and where we might be able to sort of improve and add greater value to throughout a brand development process.
Bringing things to life
So let’s look a little bit at bringing this to life. So I’ve got two case studies to share with you today to look at how we can identify brand equity and actively amplify it.
So both these examples use three F’s, but the route to get to them is a little bit different for each of them.
We’re going to look at two ways that we might want to build our brand equity. The first is building equity where you’re a challenger rather than the leader in the sector.
And the second is around building equity in a sense of place and locality. So how we can term regional heritage into something more meaningful and new. Let’s start with that National Challenger equity, building equity to set yourself apart.
Building equity to set yourself apart
What to be in a world of orange triangles
MS Trust support people living with MS. They combine a really sort of amazing mix of expertise, with lived experience. And the people they support feel super positive about the charity and they have real strong connections with their staff and their volunteers.
But when we came to them, this wasn’t reflected in their brand at all. So it was seen as cold, it was seen as outdated and it really didn’t just sort of reflect those strong personal connections that people felt for the charity. The result of this is the charity won’t maximise their potential to reach new audiences. They weren’t cutting through and ultimately it was affecting their ability to increase income generation.
So we knew that certain aspects of the brand needed to evolve from the brief, but there was in particular, in there, a feeling internally, the blue might be too commonplace in the charity sector to hold much equity for the brand and also that it risks them feeling too much like the NHS. So on the face of this, this makes quite a lot of sense.
The charity sector can feel quite awash with blue. But we wanted to just sort of stress test that assumption a little bit more and think about where we actually really needed to cut through.
So when we look at the MS sector specifically, the leader in that sector is MS Society, whose logo is an orange triangle. So it can sometimes see a little bit reductive, but actually sometimes things are just that simple, but in a world of orange triangles, being a blue square is actually about as different as you can get.
When we started looking at that, those three Fs, that familiarity and that function of these were scoring really strongly. So everyone we talked to in our discovery phase, knew MS trust as the blue square one. This isn’t just about familiarity, it’s also performing a really sort of critical function for us. It’s about setting ourselves apart from our sector leader in the minds of our audience.
So it was clearly some equity there, but when we started to measure it and stress test it a bit more, we also saw some potential to sort of strengthen it.
So looking at how well these assets were functioning, we saw a couple of issues. The existing blue colour had a relatively low contrast ratio, which meant accessibility could become a bit of friction point. So pretty early on, we looked at developing a new deeper, more vibrant blues, solved this problem, so we improve that functionality whilst we retain that familiarity.
And the second functional point also came up during discovery. So when we talk to every audience group about the charity, everyone referred them almost exclusively as MS Trust. But the name in the logo was Multiple Sclerosis Trust.
So again, this small kind of disconnect between how our audience refers to us and how we show up, just risks breaking that mental short cut that we’re working really hard to establish.
And the third piece of the puzzle is around feeling. So while a blue square was the best way to set ourselves apart from our competitors, it felt kind of way too cold at the moment.
So our strategy had been all built around MS Trust’s reputation for reflecting the realities of living with MS. They’re really known and valued for telling it like it is with a real kind of straight up warmth. So a couple of quotes from our kind of discovery here.
“I don’t think our brand represents us, there’s complete mismatch there in terms of the vibe we’re putting out there versus what we’re actually like as a charity.” So we wanted that feeling to be reflected more in our mark. So we explored a lot of ways to graphically reflect that more sort of fluid, changing nature of the condition in a new MS monogram.
This was about helping people feel seen and helping them feel that same positive connection they feel in their interactions with the charity.
So putting it all together, we arrived at our new logo. So building on the equity that was already there, but turning the dial to create something that’s familiar, that’s functional and really reflects the values and the feelings that people associate with the brand.
And cracking the logo then became the foundation for building out a new identity system that, again, rolled those three F’s through everything. So, hearing our logo across every key touchpoint really starts to kind of drive up that familiarity for us. and bring that feeling of warmth, that realness and that expertise through our illustration, through our use of photography and our graphic assets as well.
So we were able to create a really flexible and dynamic identity system that starts to pour that equity into other areas of our brand.
The new brand taps into what was working by looking at equity through a really kind of specific lens, rather than taking the sector at large, we want to see how we can set ourselves apart as a challenger within the MS sector.
Takeaway #1: Find your clear space and own it
So what were the takeaways here? The first thing is to look at differentiation three different lenses. We want to find our own clear space and really own it. So there’s no point designing an awesome identity, just to realise someone else already did it. So are we really trying to compete with the entire charity sector here? Or is your more immediate sector, the space that you need to stand out in?
So for MS Trust, if we took sector at large, it’d be sort of quite hard to make a case for retaining that blue, but within the MS sector itself, it had significant equity that we could lean on.
Takeaway #2: Talk to actual people
Secondly, talk to actual people who come into contact with your brand and genuinely listen to what they say.
So if everyone refers to your charity differently to how you refer to yourself, you might be inadvertently causing a friction. So don’t be that brand that just talks to your agency while your audience sits awkwardly in the middle.
Takeaway #3: Evolving equity can make it stronger
And finally, just because your identity, you identify potential brand equity, it doesn’t mean it can’t evolve.
MS Trust equity was in that combination of a blue and a square, but what that blue looked like and what went in that square wasn’t working as well as it could. So that’s where we chose to strengthen it and build that brand equity.
Okay, so we’re going to shift our focus a little bit for our second example.
Building equity to signal a sense of place
How to turn legacy into equity
Again, we’re going to be looking at how we can evolve something that’s familiar but seen potentially a bit negatively and turn it into something much more positive for a brand. But to do that, we’re going to look at it from a brand that’s rooted very much in locality this time.
East Lancashire Hospice provides palliative care to people across four communities in Lancashire.
They’re really deeply rooted in the communities they work in and they’re really loved by the people they support. But again, their brand was holding them back, so it didn’t reflect the charity’s values, or their goals, it was feeling sort of really outdated and just disconnected from the realities of their work.
During our discovery phase, a lot of this sentiment came through in spades, so a couple of quotes: “Our uniforms are grey, which reminds me of a wet, miserable day…”, which is not the sort of association we want to be having. “…The red colour in the brand is inappropriate – It doesn’t portray the hospice properly.”
People want them to be “bold, bright and cheerful” and more of an accurate reflection of staff and volunteers. And “You really feel like you’re doing your bit with someone more local and we’re all about keeping it local.”
That sense of locality and those roots in the community came through really strongly.
So from a brand perspective, from that discovery, there wasn’t really a lot of love and there was definitely a sense that in theory, we could sort of completely start again. But we’re always a little bit reluctant to completely throw things out if we think there might be potential to build them.
So wherever possible, creating a bit of a link between the old brand and the new is a really good way to make sure we bring people with us. But what do we actually sort of have when we broke it down? We had sort of a relatively sad looking flower that wasn’t really loved. And a strong dominant red colour that were both sort of highly familiar, but not really viewed positively.
But a big part of what we heard from audiences was that importance of the community and the hospices routes in the local area. Luckily, as it happens, East Lancashire has a red flower of its own, Lancashire Rose and for us, this became our creative bridge.
So it tapped into that strong feeling that the hospice really sat at the heart of the local area in the community. And it was a way for us to take that familiarity in those existing brand assets and evolve them in something that completely changed how our audience experienced the brand.
So it’s a combination of the Lancashire Rose, sitting at the heart of the community, led to the new logo, a much bolder, warmer, more distinctive visual shorthand that completely roots them in their location.
So retaining and bolstering this equity and getting that warmth and that feeling to shine through became the jumping off point for the rest of the brand. A red went from being something that was sort of quite dominant, a little bit oppressive, to a real kind of positive, vibrant accent that shows up across the brand and is supported by a much kind of warmer supporting palate.
That warmth and approachable feel from the logo also extended out into the broader graphic language, so it speaks to the hospital’s sort of flexible individual approach to palliative care.
And then the mark creates that real strong functional visual shorthand for the charity across every touchpoint, whether we’re looking at our charity shops through to our kind of social avatars. Basically, the result was a brand that bolstered and built Bran equity, where there was a feeling there wasn’t necessarily any to begin with. And it laid the foundation for greater equity across every aspect of the brand moving forwards.
Takeaway #1: Interrogate (but don’t dismiss) heritage
So again, what do we take away here? So the first is to interrogate but not to dismiss heritage. So we’re absolutely right to question whether something should stay.
That’s our job as part of the brand development process. But digging beyond the surface might just sort of present an opportunity to evolve something negative into something really meaningful.
Takeaway #2: Tap into shared ground
The second takeaway is to tap into our shared common ground. So with any brand, we want to find the emotional overlap between what we stand for and what matters to our audience.
So for an organisation that was so rooted in locality and in the community, that was a really natural place for us to lean. And finally, it’s to lead with feeling.
Takeaway #3: Lead with feeling
So I’ve talked quite a lot this morning about sort of viewing things objectively and trying to remove subjectivity. But how things feel to our audience absolutely matters. So it’s our job to make our brand feel like the best possible version of people’s experience with us as an organisation. We want that feeling to permeate through every aspect of our brand.
Wrapping things up
So, hopefully, that’s provided a little bit of food for thought and shown how you might sort of start to view your own brand equity and just wrapping up here, there are four things we want to keep in mind if you’re looking at developing your brand, going forwards.
1. Take stock of what you’ve got
So the first is take stock of what you’ve got, make sure you review every aspect of your brand at the outset and measure for equity objectively.
2. Measure equity objectively
So trying to take subjectivity out of the process and considering that familiarity, that feeling and that function really does sort of give us the best chance of building real brand equity and avoiding just designing around internal nostalgia.
3. Design to fit your situation
We want to make sure we’re designing to fit our own situation as well. So are you a challenger looking to stand out? Are you a leader looking to cement your position? Figure out how your brand needs to shout in the real world and design for that.
4. Remember, equity is cumulative
And then finally, remember that equity is cumulative. So we may have one or two assets, we see as our most distinctive and most likely told equity. But this should be a foundation.
So find ways to pour that equity and that feeling into as many aspects of your brown as possible. Together these are those kind of mental short cuts that ultimately make more people trust you, choose you and give to you.
Thanks very much for listening.
By Red Stone
Presented at CharityComms Brand Breakfast forum
22nd April 2026