You want to build a winning brand: one that drives growth, earns loyalty, and stands out in the market. But too often, businesses find themselves reacting to short-term performance pressures, leaving little room to focus on long-term brand building. The result? Missed opportunities and costly setbacks that hinder sustainable growth.
Here are the key challenges businesses face when it comes to tracking brand health – and why it’s time to rethink how success is measured.
Traditional brand metrics fail to connect brand performance to market performance
Brands often focus on outcomes like profitability and ROI, overlooking the deeper drivers of consumer behavior. The challenge lies in relying too heavily on transactional data, which tells us what people buy but not why they buy it.
This disconnect means brands miss the opportunity to understand how they exist in consumers’ minds, through perceptions, emotions, and associations that shape future decisions.
The solution is brand health measurement. This initiative shifts the focus from sales spreadsheets and other traditional metrics to consumer perceptions, measuring other key attributes such as mental availability, brand image, and brand attachment. By integrating these metrics, you’ll build strategies and activation activities that truly resonate with consumers on an emotional level. In fact, 42% of consumers say brand is a key factor in product choice, and in some categories, emotional connection accounts for more than 50% of the decision-making process.
The brand looks healthy, but isn’t delivering full growth potential
When brand tracking isn’t aligned with commercial objectives, it can lead to decisions that look good on paper but don’t support business growth. For instance, a brand may focus heavily on increasing awareness and reach – metrics that suggest progress – but overlook how those efforts affect premium perceptions or pricing power. This can result in a brand that’s widely known but not seen as valuable or desirable, ultimately impacting profitability and long-term equity. Irresistible brands are ones that consumers connect with, that consumers love, and that consumers will gladly pay a premium for.
Proving brand strategy drives revenue
Marketers often struggle to demonstrate how brand-building efforts contribute to business performance. Without a clear connection to KPIs like revenue, market share, or profitability, it’s hard to justify investment.
Being able to measure, understand, and act on brand performance is essential to securing budget and proving the value of brand strategy. In fact, 30% of revenue is attributable to brand strength. By demonstrating how it contributes directly to in-market results through metrics like pricing power, customer preference, and activation effectiveness, marketers get a leg up. They can show upper management that brand building is not just a creative effort, but a commercial one. This helps justify marketing spending and positions brand strategy as a key driver of revenue growth.
Brilliant brand strategy deserves flawless activation
Brands risk over-investing in short-term activation or tactics at the expense of long-term equity. Many spend 70% or more of their budget on activation, while the optimal split is closer to 40:60 in favor of brand building.
The two deliver on different goals, but both contribute together to deliver results. Brand-building drives long-term sales and reduces customer price sensitivity. On the other hand, sales activation activities drive more obvious increases in short-term sales, but do not raise baseline sales. Brands must strike a balance between long-term brand building and short-term sales activation to get the best ROI overall.
Mitigating brand challenges: The holistic way forward
If your brand tracker isn’t driving growth, it’s time to rethink how success is measured. Tracking should align with commercial goals, uncover what truly influences consumer decisions, and guide both short-term activation and long-term brand building.
The right measurement will build a winning brand and capitalize on its full strength. NIQ’s Brand Architect delivers a complete view of brand performance, helping marketers refine strategy across the full marketing mix and turn brand health into a powerful driver of sustainable growth.
