If the activity in question does not add value to the creation and/or delivery of a distinct and valuable brand expectation and experience for the customer, change it or don't do it at all. The best way to build brand equity is to repeatedly and consistently add value through all your interactions with customers.

Brand is affected by logo, slogan, style, but how do these compare with site design, usability, customer service, what others are saying about their experience, what you are saying about yourself? As you say, some of these are more easily measured than others. One strategy might be to encourage feedback to stay on your site, e.g., with tools such as User Voice, or simply user forums. Additionally, there are tools to track user comments from across the Internet, such as with Overtone.

Launching campaigns specifically targeted at improving “brand” is a dubious undertaking for most startups, IMO; perhaps only relevant to markets where one is taking on an incumbent head-on. In such a case, I hope you have a huge marketing budget. For most start-ups, keeping engaged with customers via customer development, for example, building a quality product that solves customer pain, and providing excellent customer service will build all the “brand” you need.

Brand is affected by logo, slogan, style, but how do these compare with site design, usability, customer service, what others are saying about their experience, what you are saying about yourself? As you say, some of these are more easily measured than others. One strategy might be to encourage feedback to stay on your site, e.g., with tools such as User Voice, or simply user forums. Additionally, there are tools to track user comments from across the Internet (Overtone.

Launching campaigns specifically targeted at improving “brand” is a dubious undertaking for most startups, IMO; perhaps only relevant to markets where one is taking on an incumbent head-on. In such a case, I hope you have a huge marketing budget. For most start-ups, keeping engaged with customers via customer development, for example, building a quality product that solves customer pain, and providing excellent customer service will build all the “brand” you need.

I have always been a fan of Ford (I own a couple 60's Ford muscle cars ). But when they didn't take any government money when the could have, my love and devotion to the brand deepened.
I turned into an active advocate and talk about it like I am here.

We can assume that Ford measures their marketing programs by some metric, but how does one measure the results of this type of action?
What can we do to create the atmosphere for breeding advocates?

Thus we think it's very effective that our brands (Dogster, Catster, Snuzzy) come first, metrics and growth gets built on top of that. This is also a business strategy. It's at lot easier to monetize a brand and build upon that, than to monetize traffic and congeal it into a brand.

There are plenty of exceptions such as if you are a bottom feeder – and there's nothing wrong with that – but for that business to work you need to be the biggest whale in the ocean, not just a crafty catfish.

Consumers are expecting more from businesses these days. If your company just focus on the HARD stuffs and ignore the SOFT issues, they will eventually find out and say quit. I think Zappos has demonstrated that branding-driven companies can be successful, too.

As our startup begins to engage clients, we make sure that they feel comfortable with every aspect of their experience with us. Sure, we monitor the metrics & analytics. But at the end of the day we keep a holistic vision of brand-building in mind. At one point a client expressed a concern about whether he could include a particular feature in the hardware we were offering. We dropped everything we were doing and went to the drawing board. We researched the web and at the same time reached out for answers via forums & Twitter. We didn't have to put so much effort into such collaboration. But it was well worth the sacrifice.

Sam