Performance Measurement Is Killing Brands

Plus 2 tests with Claude prompts to test your brand's health

I bet you could name 2-3 innovators at Apple and quote at least one of their campaigns. You could also tell me what kind of person uses a Mac, down to where they likely buy their clothes and their favorite car models.

Now give me 3 feature differences between the latest iPhone model and the previous generation. No? Is that harder?

Let’s do the same with Nike. Aside from the mainstream everyday wearers, what kind of true athletes wear Nike? How are they different from Adidas or Under Armour loyalists? When you imagine their training environment, are they casually jogging on a suburban street, or are they running 200m sprints at a track? Do they run in the rain, or phone it in on inclement days?

Now, what is the most commonly used material in their gear? Sewing patterns? Where is it made? No? Harder too?

Somewhere along the line we got obsessed with sales performance and not only segmented it away from brand, we pitted them against each other. One cannot exist without the other and create any meaningful, sustainable brand value. The rise of PE backed companies, the startup boom, and Millennial DTC boutique brands got us looking at CAC and LTV and all kinds of new revenue-gilded metrics that look at how product is performing, but not the brand (Hello, Casper).

Performance metrics on their own do not indicate sustainability or equity in a brand, only that product is moving. Brand performance metrics use all data points to show how our company is embedding into people’s minds in ways that create the type of nostalgia you probably feel when you think of Reese’s Pieces and E.T. or those plastic Grimace installments next to the ball pit at McDonald’s.

I talked to a friend working at a heritage accessory company this past week (and he reads this so, hi! You know who you are) who is struggling to get leadership to look at the legacy of the brand and the nostalgia it brings; circa 90’s skate scene. A look at the website and it’s just…a bunch of product listings. No nod to their history, the very real equity and love people have for the brand, and no mention of the thousands of dollars people are listing vintage and limited edition pieces on eBay. In other words, the customers love the brand more than the brand does.

A 108 year old manufacturing client of ours discovered through our Brand Pressure Index that they have an online community of vintage resellers listing products in the thousands for a single product. They had no clue that there was an avid fanbase of customers who sought out and traded their items from the 1940’s, leaving those people completely ignored.

So what happens when, as a society, the marketplace becomes so crowded and saturated that we are optimizing the hell out of every single campaign and channel we have that we forget the meaning of it all? Capitalism, yay, sure we’re all here to make money but Pepsi is brown sugar water and they have made people feel something for generations. They have ingrained themselves into the social aesthetic of our lives. What’s the ROI on being mentioned in a rap song or on a show or simply being part of someone’s daily grab at the bodega? What’s the ROI on the fact my sister put cartoon BandAid’s in my stocking for Christmas every year and now it’s compounded into a multi-generational tradition that makes people feel safe and loved? What’s the value of that presence in the formative cells of our brains beyond “5 boxes of Care Bears Bandaids x $5/each - CAC”?

Brand measurement (NOT = marketing performance measurement) is what I do every day with every client. It’s not about loyalty, you can keep your NPS scores, I want to know how sticky the brand is. If people got angry and thought boycott!—is it easy for them to leave? Would they really? Does the brand signal something as part of their identity that giving it up would cost them emotionally? In B2B and B2G is the brand so embedded in the day to day across the organization that it would be near impossible to move to a competitor?

I also ranted a bit on LinkedIn last week about how exhausted I am [insert all the eye rolls] about brands and their agencies talking about the importance of being “customer first” and “customer obsessed” and “people centric” and “omg wtf are you even talking about.” It’s become so easy to just say what everyone else is saying, be actionless about it, and puff up our chests like we’re doing anything meaningful because we say we care about our customers.

Sorry but.. what else is there? Your customers = money = your business being afloat. Caring about them doesn’t make you special. It’s easy to care about the source of money people give us. It’s harder to think about what that transaction does to make their lives better (lining your pockets doesn’t equal value to them).

Behind the paywall: Two test you can run this week with Claude prompts, adapted from our Brand Pressure Index scoring.