How powerful is your favorite brand? A new tool from the VC firm behind Warby Parker can tell you

Forerunner Ventures, the female-founded VC firm, is famous for identifying breakout brands. It has funded some of the most iconic consumer brands of the internet era, from Warby Parker to Glossier to Away.



Starting today, the firm is offering a free tool that companies of all sizes can use to assess how consumers perceive their brand. The Brand Power Score allows brands to survey a broad swath of consumers—including customers and non-customers—along six dimensions, resulting in a quantifiable score that shows how impactful a brand really is. The goal is to give brands specific feedback about where they might need to work harder to strengthen aspects of their business.



Kirsten Green founded Forerunner Ventures in 2010. The firm was pivotal to the rise of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) movement over the past decade, as it was prescient in providing early stage investment to breakout startups in this space. Some of these brands, like Warby Parker, have had enduring success; others, like Away, have struggled. Across the board, however, Green and her partners have always had a strong sense of what makes a brand compelling to consumers.



Eurie Kim, Forerunner’s managing partner, who joined in 2012, says that the concept of brand can seems hard to pin down, but it’s effectively the external manifestation of the company’s essence. “Even internally, we sometimes struggled to verbalize exactly why a brand stood out to us,” she says. “We decided to think harder about this, and find a way to quantify a part of the business that seems totally subjective. After all, of you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.”



Over the past year, Kim has spearheaded the creation of the Brand Power Score. The Forerunner team identified six important aspects of a brand that are crucial to its success:



Feelings: Whether the brand provokes a strong emotional response Reliability: How reliable it seems Identity: Whether it has a distinct visual identity Experience: How good the customer experience is North Star: Whether it has a strong moral compass Differentiation: Whether it stands out in the market



In the brand’s parlance, these six features fit into the acronym “FRIEND.” Kim says that as Forerunner has studied branding over the past decade, it has identified that breakout brands have a unique range of characteristics that make them seem human. “We liked the acronym because we’ve always thought that great brands feel like people, they feel like good friends,” says Kim.



[Image: Forerunner Ventures]



Forerunner Ventures is offering this tool free to any brand who wants to use it. Kim says that this was partly to help start a conversation about new ways that founders and CEO can invest in their branding. But in some ways, the Brand Power Score is also a form of marketing for Forerunner, allowing it to establish itself as an expert in identifying impactful brands.



To come up with a score, a Forerunner Ventures partnered with Survey Monkey to create a template. Companies can send the survey to a large cross-section of consumers. Respondents are given a series of statements, like, “I find this brand inspiring,” and can say whether they agree or disagree. Then, Survey Monkey will crunch the results and receive a score that ranges from -100% to 100%. The score is broken down based on people who use the brand’s product, and those who do not. “The results are a snapshot into a particular moment in time,” says Kim. “This is useful because the results could change before or after a major event.”



Take Southwest. Forerunner measured its score before and after the holidays. After all of the travel disruptions this past winter, Southwest’s reliability score cratered from 70% to 46%. (This drove its overall Brand Power Score from 63% to 49%.) Meanwhile, Farmer’s Dog, a dog food brand within the Forerunner portfolio, saw its score dramatically increase after it ran a Super Bowl ad.



Until its Super Bowl debut, Farmer’s Dog hadn’t spent a lot of money on advertising, growing instead through word of mouth. But after the Super Bowl, brand’s scores on emotional resonance and differentiation increased by 10 points among non-customers and increased 7 points among customers. “We could see that something was happening with our brand after the commercial aired, but this gave us very specific data points,” says Jonathan Regev, Farmer’s Dog co-founder.



To test its Brand Power Score, Forerunner Ventures has sent out surveys to 14,000 consumers about 400 of companies, from big well-known brands like Apple and Disney to startups. Trader Joe’s and Google, for instance, scored strongly on reliability; Tesla, Dyson, and Ikea scored well on differentiation.



Forerunner’s Brand Power Score will exist alongside other metrics that brands use to assess their brand, including the well-known “Net Promoter Score,” which identifies whether a consumer would recommend a brand. But Regev says that Forerunner’s tool stands out because it provides more nuance than other frameworks, helping to lay out what aspects of a brand are working, and what aren’t. “There are so many touch points that go into a brand,” says Regev. “We like this framework because it speaks to everything from the product itself to whether consumers resonate emotionally with what you’re doing.”