Growing the brand for the future by understanding the competition.

Situation

More than just postage machines, Pitney Bowes was successfully reinventing itself as the premier mail management brand. In order to manage this evolution, Pitney Bowes was interested in understanding its reputation on an ongoing basis in a competitive context. They also wanted actionable data to support and optimize the brand’s impact on financial performance so as to assign tangible value to the brand. This would help to validate and promote ongoing branding efforts.

Solution

In order to gain descriptive portraits of the current state of the Pitney Bowes brand, CoreBrand has conducted multiple tracking waves of a custom CBR — CoreBrand Review. These reports examine brand reputation (its Familiarity and Favorability ratings — Pitney Bowes’s Brand Power) and Brand Equity data, within a competitive context (4 peers), as well as against the Office Equipment Industry and CoreBrand database averages. Current reviews show Pitney Bowes:

• Brand Power is growing overall, with a slight rebound after recent waves of decline
• Familiarity declined slightly after seeing many waves of growth — but all peers continue to see decline
• Favorability tracks closely with peers, but all are trending down
• Favorability attributes suggest business results and service are driving brand performance more than corporate leadership among peers
• Favorability attributes saw upward movement across Office Equipment and Database averages
• Corporate brand percentage of contribution to market value is stronger than 76% of the companies in the CoreBrand Directory of Brand Equity.

These findings indicated Pitney Bowes was on par with peer performance, but could leverage its relative strength in Brand Power against peers.

Our continued custom tracking of the Pitney Bowes brand provides management with the opportunity to monitor the brand against yearly objectives and goals, and the ability to respond to the changing marketplace.