Measuring the impact of brand strategy is one of the most common things I get asked about. Here's a practical guide to the metrics that matter - what to track with customers, what to track inside the organisation, and how to set realistic expectations over time.

What is brand strategy measurement? 

Brand strategy measurement is the process of tracking whether your brand strategy is working - assessing how well it is understood and acted on internally, how it is shaping customer perceptions and behaviour, and whether it is translating into commercial growth. It covers metrics across three areas: employee engagement, brand associations and behaviours, and financial outcomes - tracked over time as the strategy is activated.

Why is brand strategy measurement difficult?

Most brand strategies begin with a moment of real clarity. The ideas land, the team is aligned, the strategy is agreed. And then the client moves swiftly on to the question many strategists struggle to answer: how will we know if this is actually working?

Let’s start with a reality check. Measuring brand strategy isn’t easy - and there are three reasons for that.

1. Firstly, brand strategy is an organisational tool that’s intended to last a long time. Its value is built over the long term. Embedding associations, changing minds and behaviour and seeing that hit the bottom-line takes time. That’s why many of the world’s best brands haven’t changed the answers in their brand strategy for decades. So getting immediate measures of impact are difficult.
2. Secondly, a lot of what you're measuring isn't about the strategy on a page; it's about how the client has activated it, how they've brought the whole organisation on board and how they're designing customer experiences around it. Brand strategy sets a direction but if the direction isn’t followed you won’t see results. Much of that is out of your hands.
3. The third challenge is budget. In an ideal world, every client would run regular brand tracking studies with an external research agency who have category benchmarks and expert data analysts. In the real world, small and medium sized businesses can’t afford those six-figure trackers. But even with a modest budget there are meaningful things you can measure that are specifically designed for the brand you’re working on.

The good news is, while brand strategy is a long game, that doesn’t mean you have to wait years and spend thousands to know if it’s working.  I'm going to cover the key areas you can measure, both externally with customers and internally within the organisation. I’ll cover things to measure in year one, years 2-3, and over the longer term.

What brand strategy success looks like

To understand what to measure we need to understand what success looks like. Every business will have its individual goals and challenges, but in general a strong brand strategy should help to do three things over time:

1. Create value in people’s minds (clear, compelling and consistent associations for buyers and employees)
2. Align the organisation to take decisions that build this value (guiding behaviours, experiences and innovation)
3. Translate that value into commercial advantage (lower price elasticity, share, sales profit)

Now, a strategy on a PowerPoint slide can’t achieve these outcomes alone - but it is the critical thing that sets the direction. It takes the whole organisation aligned behind the direction to see the biggest outcomes. And there’s obviously a lag between setting the direction and getting the outcomes.  The four questions you answer in a brand strategy start off as intentions - then gradually show up in perceptions, behaviours and, finally, financials.

What you can track quickly, though, are indications of progress.

What to expect, and when

Help clients understand what’s realistic to measure in year one and over the longer term.  Here’s an overview of some of the things you can measure and when. 

Year one: establish baselines and prove you're embedding it

Start by getting your internal measurements in place and then focus on the external  - because if the strategy isn’t understood and acted on internally, it won’t be experienced externally.

In the first year, start by measuring internal adoption, understanding and alignment.
Can teams recall the strategy? Do they understand it? Are they making decisions based on it?  Is it applied consistently - not just in marketing but across internal policies and procedures? The other critical thing to do is establish your benchmarks internally and externally, so you have a baseline to compare against in year two.

In year one, you want to measure things like:

1. Launch and activation metrics

e.g. % of key touchpoints, policies and procedures updated with the new strategy. 
Don’t forget this is as much internal (things like induction, 360 reviews, welcome letters) as it is external (e.g.web copy, proposals, ad campaigns, content).

You can also look at things like training reach - the % of employees who have attended a brand strategy training session.

2. Understanding and alignment metrics

Work with HR to adapt or set up an employee engagement survey that includes questions that track pride, understanding, belief and engagement with the strategy.

Questions like:

 “I am proud to work at xxxx.”

“I am proud of xxx’s brand and reputation.” (The gap between these can be telling).

“I understand how to apply our values and behaviours in my role.”

“Leadership makes decisions consistent with our brand values.”

“I feel a sense of meaning and purpose in my work."

"I believe I can make a valuable contribution to the company's purpose." 

McKinsey research found that only 15% of frontline employees say they are living their company's purpose at work, while 85% of senior leaders believe they are. That gap is a brand strategy problem as much as it's an HR problem and one to track to see whether the strategy is really being embedded.

3. Setting benchmarks

Setting a benchmark for some of the things you want to track progress against is key. Ideally this is something you should talk about right at the beginning of a brand strategy project. That way you're tracking genuine movement and progress from a pre-strategy point in time.

Areas to benchmark can include:

1. NPS, eNPS and ceNPS scores and/or customer satisfaction
2. Brand funnel metrics (see below)
3. Key meaningful associations measured against competitors
4. Key measures of affinity vs. competitors (such as most trusted, preferred, liked, iconic) or ‘brand for people like me’
5. Key measures of difference vs. competitors
6. Analysing and quantifying the themes from customer feedback/reviews, win/loss reports

Start with the brand funnel

If you haven't come across this before, a brand funnel tracks the progress of buyers from being aware of your brand, to being familiar with it, to thinking favourably of it, to considering it, to intending to buy it. You ask different questions at each stage (read more about this here - pages 18 and 19).

Some of those stages - like awareness - are more about the success of your marketing activity than brand strategy specifically. But the middle of the funnel? Favourability and consideration? Those should improve meaningfully when a strategy is in place and being activated well. If your new strategy is relevant to what customers care about, once they know this about you they should feel more favourably towards you. Because a strong strategy positions the brand as more relevant to the right customers, and relevance drives favourability and then consideration.

What you're tracking overall is funnel conversion - how well people are moving from one stage to the next, and where they're dropping out. If your strategy and marketing is being well executed, you should see those conversion rates improving over time. It won't happen overnight, but it's one of the most valuable long-term signals you can watch and is typically well understood by the client marketers you’ll be working with. To ensure you're setting realistic expectations all of this is best understand against competitors and category norms. 

Another broad measurement category you can get a baseline on is ‘affinity.’  This is interpreted in different ways by different research companies but broadly it’s about understanding positive engagement and positive feelings towards the brand. So it could encompass social sharing, sentiment analysis and engagement metrics as well as more survey-based questions like understanding preference for the brand over competitors. Or simple phrases like: ‘This is a brand for people like me.” NPS can also come under this header.

Understanding NPS - all three versions of it

Net Promoter Score is a globally accepted measure of customer satisfaction that has been directly linked to business growth. Your client is probably already tracking it, but if they're not, this is a great time to start.

The question is simple: 'On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or family member?'

But here's what makes it more interesting for brand strategy work: you can run three versions of it:

1. Customer NPS - would customers recommend the brand?
2. Employer NPS - would employees recommend it as a place to work?
3. Employer/Customer NPS - would employees recommend the brand to a prospective customer?

That third one is underused and can be really revealing. In my work with clients I've seen a Employer/Customer NPS of 60 - employees were quite willing to recommend the brand to customers. But the Employer NPS was only 30. The organisation was confident in what they sold, but not in what it felt like to work there. The brand strategy work and its influence on improving the employee experience should be helping to close that gap.

Don’t forget difference

In Brand Strategy Academy we talk about the 3 lenses you need to consider when creating a strategy – difference, relevance and authenticity.

Difference and relevance (what Kantar call being meaningful) explain 60% of how ‘predisposed’ people are to buy a brand – i.e. how much people feel like a brand is the right choice for them. Kantar’s research across 54 markets and 540 categories has shown that brands with strong predisposition have nine times more volume share and people will pay twice the price for them, and they are twice as likely to grow value share in the future than brands with weaker predisposition.  So difference can be an important indicator of future financial outcomes, making it worth adding some questions about perceived difference vs. competition to track whether your new strategy is helping to improve this perception. Difference has 4 different dimensions (read about them here), so your questions could cover things like which brand is perceived to be the category leader, or which brands are challenging the status quo, or simply a ranking on difference vs competition.

What about salience?

Salience explains that other 40% of predisposition. Salient brands are ones that pop into your mind at that point when you’re looking or ready to buy something. It’s really a marketing measurement because it’s all about getting brands associated with Category Entry Points (bear with me – I know this is more jargon!). Category Entry Points are the reasons why people go shopping for brands.  Like, you’re redecorating your living room, so you’re suddenly thinking of paint brands. Or you’re due a phone upgrade so you’re considering phone brands. This is part of the work within a marketing strategy and plan so isn’t directly linked to brand strategy measurement. But you could of course cover all sorts of other questions in a customer survey or tracker.  Raise this with your client but don’t worry if this is new to you – this should be part of the work they’ve been doing to improve their marketing strategy. 

Years two and three: prove it's building associations and changing perceptions and behaviours

By year two or three, if the strategy is being properly activated, you should see movement in brand perception metrics - stronger associations with your intended positioning (the answer to WHAT you do), improved favourability and consideration, and signals of values (WHO you are and HOW you do things) showing up in customer experience feedback.

A brand is, at its core, the set of associations people hold in their minds about you. A brand strategy identifies what you want those associations to be. So the most direct way to measure whether your strategy is working is to ask about those associations.  You can about this in open questions like this:

"When you think about [Company X], what associations come to mind?" or "What three words come to mind when you think about [Company X]?"

Open-ended questions get you to the top-of-mind associations - the things people genuinely think without being prompted. But you'll also want to ask about specific attributes, particularly the ones that are central to your strategy.

For instance, if your strategy is built around an idea of making it easier and faster for people to make progress, you'd want to create a list of statements that include those ideas, alongside other category attributes and competitor associations.

What you get back are percentages - what proportion strongly agree, agree, and so on. And this is where a benchmark study becomes incredibly valuable. If you run this before you launch the strategy, you might find that 60% of people strongly agree your brand makes things easier. You can then set a KPI (key performance indicator – just a measure of success) for the progress you want to see: we expect to move to 65% in year one and 73% in year two, as the strategy is activated. You also want to track this against your competitors.

You’ll ask about this in a brand survey - often known as a tracker. It’s called a tracker because you want to keep tracking progress over time. Design it once and repeat it at least once a year. You’ll have this in place already since it’s what you would be using to set the benchmarks in year 1.  You can also include the brand funnel in there, and measurements like NPS.  The more you include the more expensive and complicated it can be to run – particularly if you are running this across more than one country. But there are ways you can do it yourself using tools like SurveyMonkey and there are companies like Attest and Tracksuit providing really reasonably priced monthly trackers for clients that just include the funnel and key associations. 

The other survey you’ll be repeating – at least once a year – is an employee engagement survey.  That should include ongoing measurements of brand strategy understanding, belief, engagement, behaviour and pride, along with Employer NPS questions.

If brand identity work has also been an outcome of the strategy, you’ll want to track your distinctive brand assets on two dimensions: recognition (how many buyers recognise the asset) and connection (how many connect the asset shown to your brand). (See chapter 2 and chapter 4 of Rebrand Right for more detail on this).

The other measurements to start to track at this point are employer ones – like job application numbers and the quality of applications, attrition, retention, satisfaction and engagement.

Longer term: connecting the brand strategy to financial value

Kantar's BrandZ data shows that brands with strong equity are four times more likely to grow value share than those with weak equity. The world's most valuable brands have consistently outperformed market benchmarks over twenty years. That's the case you're building, slowly and steadily, with every measurement cycle. Along with strengthened associations, preference and favourability you’ll be looking for pricing resilience and elasticity, improved customer acquisition, share gains, net sales, and profit. 

Now, if you’re a designer new to strategy, or a strategist who isn’t comfortable with financials – don’t panic. Setting commercial KPIs (key performance indicators) is usually the job of the CMO (chief marketing officer) working with the CFO (chief financial officer).  This isn’t what you’ve been asked to do – you’ve been asked to create the strategy.  So you don’t need to have all the answers, in fact you can plainly state that measuring the impact of brand strategy is not what you do! But I hope this has given you the confidence to raise the issue of needing to set some measurements, and equipped you with some of the answers on how to think about what to measure for the first year or 2 at least. 

Ultimately you can communicate that investment in brand strategy, and the health of the brand overall, when sustained, is associated with stronger growth of the business across a multitude of measures. (Find lots of examples here).  Strategy is the critical starting point.

In summary: a simple brand strategy measurement plan for a small to mid-sized client

There are plenty of well-established research agencies like Kantar serving the needs of the large multinational clients tracking their brand strategy and brand health over time. But if you’re working with an SME, here’s a realistic set-up to propose.

Year 1: Benchmarks, Launch, activation, alignment understanding metrics

1. A baseline survey with customers and prospects to capture brand funnel metrics,  associations, NPS, affinity and difference
2. An internal employee survey that tracks pride, understanding, belief, behaviours and engagement with the strategy along with eNPS and ecNPS
3. A simple audit of key touchpoints to track % updated
4. Set KPIs (Key performance indicators) 
5. Qualitative tracking of customer reviews/satisfaction, the comments that sit behind the NPS scores, and customer and employee experience improvements introduced and their alignment with the strategy

Years 2–3: Tracking shifts in associations, perceptions and behaviours

1. Repeat the external survey annually or twice a year, focusing on the same questions as above
2. Repeat the employee survey and also track employer metrics: e.g., quality of applications, attrition, retention, satisfaction and engagement.
3. Put brand metrics alongside financials. Determine the right ones with the client. Could include pricing resilience and elasticity, improved customer acquisition, share gains, net sales, profit. 

Long term - Continue all of the above!

You don’t need dozens of metrics. For all clients, a one‑page dashboard with around 10-15 measurements and the questions associated with them is more powerful than a huge spreadsheet. 

But you do need client commitment to embedding the brand strategy within the business and the employee and customer experience to see movements in the measurements to get the growth they are looking for. The brand strategy sets the direction - but you’ve got to move in that direction to get to the desired destination.

I hear one last question from you: what if you're working with a really small client -  just a solopreneur, or a start-up?  They don't have employees or the budget to run the surveys above - but they're serious about building a strong brand and tracking how well they're actioning the strategy.  

I hear you! I'm a solopreneur too. 
Here's a couple of things to consider.  

How to measure brand strategy impact for really small businesses

You still need the strategy. The answers to the four questions. Once you have them you have something to hold yourself accountable to.  At the simplest level you can run a customer feedback/satisfaction survey. For Brand Strategy Academy I do mine through Google Forms. I use an NPS question and I also ask for qualitative feedback.  What I'm looking for: is what I say I want to stand for played back by people who have experienced the course? Brand Strategy Academy promises clarity and confidence.  In the survey I look through the testimonials and regularly read things like:

"The way you teach brings so much clarity and confidence. You strip things down to what actually matters, and explain it so incredibly clearly."  Angelica Carreno

"A clear, no-nonsense approach to learning brand strategy, with a process that actually feels doable, both for me and for my clients. It’s given me a way to bring structure, clarity and confidence into my work, and I can already see the difference it’s making."  Vardeep Edwards

"Brand Strategy Academy delivered exactly as promised, brand strategy without the fluff. Sarah breaks everything down in a way that gets right to the core of ‘brand,’ its value, and its impact to companies. It gave me the confidence I desperately needed. I highly recommend this course to anyone trying to understand brand and how to deliver real impact for your clients." Daniel Secor

You can do the same. Track customer feedback against WHAT you say you do and WHY you say you exist.   My WHAT is all about clarity and confidence, my WHY is about helping people step into their next stage of growth. So comments like these really help me know I am on track:
 
"This course has been transformative for my career - after being in the corporate world for 20 years and a former CMO, I now own my own boutique firm and provide brand strategy to my clients. This course boosted my confidence and gave me a road map for success!" Tracy Salsbury

"Off the back of your Brand Strategy Academy course I did, and continue to use, we just won our biggest rebranding project in our 14 year business history. Many thanks for all the great stuff you taught me and continue to do so!" Andrew Hope

"After years as a strategist I have really found my stride and am making huge progress for myself and my company. Hands down the best money I've ever spent." Jody Frost

 Hope this helps!

Summary table: Measuring the impact of brand strategy

 Want the full measurement dashboard?

This article gives you the overview - the thinking behind what to measure, and some of the key questions to ask. Inside Brand Strategy Academy, there are complete research guides with all the questions to ask and plug-and-play templates.  Brand strategy measurement is just a small part of a full curriculum and toolkit designed to help strategists and designers offer brand strategy with clarity and confidence.

Find out more about Brand Strategy Academy →