Brand Health Is the Wrong Question
How brands are measuring themselves based on their best day ever, and why that doesn't work.
In April 2023, Bud Light was the #1 selling beer in America. It had held that position since 2001. Every major brand ranking—Interbrand, BrandZ, the consultancy lists—had it sitting comfortably in the top tier.
Then they ran that single infamous partnership and lost their #1 spot.
Sales dropped sharply within weeks and by May, Modelo had taken over. Two and a half years later, Bud still hasn’t gotten the position back.
Every system that measured Bud Light’s brand had it right: at steady state. What none of them measured was what would happen the day the brand had to absorb a decision.
This also happened to Peloton. Through 2021 they were on every consumer brand list, “most loved” roundup, and category ranking that mattered. The brand looked iron-clad. Then the world reopened, the market they’d built the brand for stopped existing in the same shape, and the brand couldn’t translate. Stock crashed 95% from peak, valuation went from roughly $50B to under $2B, they’re on their third CEO in three years, and they still haven’t figured out what they are. The rankings didn’t see it coming because the brand they’d been measuring was the wrong brand for the moment that arrived.
Or take pretty much any acquired company eighteen months in, the ones still operating under three different brand names because nobody in the deal sorted it out, with sales decks that contradict the website that contradicts what the founder says on the podcast. From the outside it still looks like a brand, but anyone working there will tell you it’s four companies sharing a logo and the merged sales teams probably hate each other.
There’s a whole measurement industry built around brand health. A few examples: Interbrand publishes its annual list, Prophet has its Brand Relevance Index, and BrandZ ranks the top 100 most valuable.They are all fabulous, and each one measures the same thing: how a brand performs when nothing is happening to it.
Steady-state brand measurement is useful right up until the moment it stops being useful, which unfortunately tends to be the exact moment you most need information.
The reason the model persists is that it’s the easier model. Steady-state is comparable. You can run it year over year. You can publish a list. You can sell it to a board. Pressure is harder to measure because pressure is situational—what’s about to happen to a specific company, in a specific market, with a specific leadership team and a specific cap structure. The variables don’t repeat, so the industry built the number that scales and stopped asking the question that doesn’t.
But brands don’t break under steady state. They break under pressure: a leadership transition, a sale process, a founder who finally exits, a new owner who wants the brand to do something it was never built to do, a market shift that exposes a positioning gap, a 24-hour news cycle that asks the brand to take a public position. These are the moments that decide whether a brand survives the next five years, and not one of the major rankings tells you anything useful about how a brand will perform in them.
Last year I started building a different number, based off of 12+ years seeing this pattern with clients. A brand pressure score, rather than a brand health score. The question wasn’t “how is this brand performing right now?” It was “how would this brand perform if something happened to it tomorrow?”
It’s called the Brand Pressure Index. (try it out here)
It’s built around what actually happens when a brand gets squeezed. Not market share, CAC, LTV, brand awareness or anything that might show up in a Q3 deck. It looks at the things that show up when a PE firm wires the money and starts asking why nobody internally agrees on what the company does, or when a founder leaves and the brand walks out the door with them, or when a category-defining moment requires a position and the brand discovers it doesn’t have one (and then takes one anyway, badly, in real time).
Every brand sits somewhere on the Index, whether anyone has measured it or not. The four scores are In Crisis, Under Pressure, Stable but Exposed, and Pressure-Ready.
Most brands I’ve scored land in Stable but Exposed—the steady-state metrics look fine and there’s a fault line nobody’s checked. Bud Light was Stable but Exposed for twenty-two years…then it wasn’t. (It’s like when they say “the divorce came outta NOWHERE!? Right but did it? Or were you not paying attention?)
Fun fact: the people inside the company rarely know which tier they’re in. The CEO 9 times out of 10 thinks the brand is in better shape than it is, and the team thinks it’s worse than the CEO does, and the market is usually operating off something different than either of them or isn’t even clear on what they do. I’ve started calling that delta between how a leadership team scores their own brand and what the actual Assessment surfaces the Self-Perception Gap. It’s one of the most consistent patterns in the work, and the size of the gap turns out to be a problem in itself, separate from whatever the actual score is.
A health score works if you never get sick. The brands that broke in the last eighteen months all had clean scores right up until the day they didn’t.
Behind the paywall, I’m walking through what each tier of the Index actually looks like from inside a company versus from outside, plus a 7-question self-diagnostic that’ll give you a directional read on your own brand in about ten minutes. It’s the part I’d normally only share inside a leadership session.
