The measurability objection
Against brand work stands almost always the same objection: it can't be measured. From this it is concluded that it is soft, arbitrary, secondary. The objection is half right and entirely misleading. Brand impact can be measured. Just not with the metrics that are quickest to hand.
The real problem is not a lack of measurability, but false measurability. Organisations measure what is easy to count and treat it as if it were what counts. That way brand impact isn't measured, but replaced — by its cheapest proxies.
The problem is not a lack of measurability. It's false measurability.
What's easy to measure rarely counts
Clicks, impressions, reach, short-term conversions — all easy to capture and accordingly popular. But they measure activity, not impact. A brand can have high reach and still be interchangeable. It can generate many clicks and still hold no premium. The numbers rise, the impact doesn't.
The damage occurs when these easy-to-measure figures become goals. What gets measured gets optimised. Measure reach and you get reach — even at the expense of everything else. The brand is reduced to what its metrics depict. That is what measuring to death means: the measurement deforms what it was meant to measure.
Three levels of brand impact
Impact shows up on three levels, and only the top one is immediately visible. The first: short-term reactions — reach, engagement, direct enquiries. Useful as an early indicator, but easy to fool. The second: perception — what a brand stands for, how it's categorised, how much it's trusted. Slower, but closer to what counts.
The third and most important: economic impact — premiums that hold, the quality of enquiries, winning the right talent and partners, resilience in a crisis. This level is the real brand impact. It is measurable, but it needs time and the courage not to force a result every month.
What gets measured gets optimised. Measure only reach and you get reach — at the expense of everything else.
Lead impact, don't measure it to death
Brand impact is led not through a single dashboard, but through a few honest indicators across all three levels — and through the discipline to take the slow ones more seriously than the fast ones. A good set of metrics warns early without forcing short-term behaviour that weakens the brand long-term.
The real art is patience with system: measuring without immediately translating every reading into an action. A brand is long-term storage. Steer it with short-term metrics and you optimise the quarter while squandering the decade. To lead its impact, measure less, but the right things — and tolerate the number that won't turn green for two years.