Updated April 2026. Originally published August 2025.
Brand measurement isn't about proving a clean cause-and-effect relationship between spend and results. At best, investment in brand increases the probability of positive commercial outcomes. That's a harder sell in a boardroom than "we spent X and got Y back" — but it's honest, and it's how every serious brand practitioner thinks about it.
Here's how to set it up properly.
Leading indicators: early signals that brand is working
Leading indicators are softer metrics that show momentum before commercial results arrive. They don't prove the end result, but they build confidence and demonstrate early movement.
Track these consistently:
- Share of search: How often your brand is searched relative to competitors. One of the strongest predictors of market share.
- NPS scores: Are customers more likely to recommend you?
- Sales team confidence: Are reps finding it easier to open conversations and hold price?
- Email and content engagement: Are prospects spending time with your thinking?
- Customer and prospect surveys: Are awareness, consideration, and preference shifting?
- Inbound quality: Not just volume, but are the right prospects coming to you?
These signals are cost-effective to track and can be set up from day one of a brand strategy engagement. They give marketing teams evidence to show the board while the bigger numbers build in the background.
Lagging indicators: the commercial proof
These are the metrics that make finance directors pay attention:
- Margin uplift: Are you holding or increasing price without losing volume?
- Win rate: Are you converting more opportunities?
- Sales cycle length: Are deals closing faster?
- Customer acquisition cost: Is it getting cheaper to win new business?
- Customer lifetime value: Are customers staying longer and spending more?
- Market share: Are you growing faster than the category?
You can't fast-track these. They take time, often 12 to 24 months, for meaningful movement. But companies that invest consistently in brand do eventually move these numbers. This is what Les Binet calls "the long" in The Long and the Short of It.
The metric most companies miss: friction
Beyond the standard leading and lagging indicators, there's a more practical way to gauge whether your brand is doing its job. Measure the friction in your commercial process.
If your brand is working, you feel it in how efficiently the business operates:
- Sales needs fewer slides to explain what you do
- Deals move with less internal reassurance and fewer sign-offs required
- You hold price because the value feels obvious to buyers
- Prospects stop asking "so what's the difference between you and [competitor]?"
- Customers repeat your story back to you in their own words
- Hiring gets easier because people understand what you stand for
These aren't vanity metrics. They're operational indicators of a brand that's reducing the cost of doing business. And they're visible to anyone in the organisation, you don't need a research agency to spot them.
The danger is what psychologist Phil Rosenzweig calls the Halo Effect: when the business is performing well, everyone assumes the brand must be strong. When performance dips, everyone wants to "fix the brand." Both reactions are usually storytelling, not diagnosis. Brand impact arrives late and arrives indirectly, which means today's results often reflect the brand as it was a couple of years ago, not as it is now.
What Good's track record shows
Across our Design Effectiveness Award entries, projects where we've been able to measure outcomes objectively, the average results are:
- +47% impact on client sales
- +40% performance versus market
- 2,888% average return on investment
These are from a self-selecting set of projects with clients willing to measure. But they demonstrate what's possible when brand strategy is executed with discipline and measured properly from the outset.
How to set up brand measurement from day one
The practical lesson from twenty years of doing this:
1. Define what you'll measure before you start. Don't retrofit measurement after the strategy is live. Agree on leading and lagging indicators upfront.
2. Set expectations with the board. Brand impact is probabilistic, not certain. Frame it that way, and you'll avoid the credibility gap.
3. Start with leading indicators. They're cheap, fast, and build internal belief while lagging indicators accumulate.
4. Track friction as a proxy. Ask the sales team, customer success team, and hiring managers whether things are getting easier or harder. That's brand showing up (or not).
5. Review quarterly, not monthly. Brand doesn't move on a monthly cadence. Quarterly reviews prevent false signals and panic decisions.
6. Don't ignore non-financial results. Shifts in culture, internal confidence, operational clarity, and employee engagement are real brand outcomes — even if they don't appear on a P&L.
Key takeaways
- Measure brand through both leading indicators (early signals) and lagging indicators (commercial proof). Don't wait for lagging indicators and measure nothing.
- Brand impact is probabilistic, not causal. Set that expectation with the board from day one.
- The most practical measurement is friction: is it getting easier or harder to sell, recruit, and retain?
- Beware the Halo Effect - strong business performance doesn't mean the brand is strong, and weak performance doesn't mean the brand is broken.
- Define your measurement framework before the strategy starts, not after.
If you want an objective view of where your brand actually sits, not the story your recent numbers are telling, the Brand Clarity Report is a good place to start.