Brand does not have a measurement problem.
It has an agreement problem.
Companies say they want more awareness, stronger thought leadership, greater share of voice, or recognition as a category leader. Those may all be reasonable ambitions.
But they are not yet measurable business objectives.
You cannot manage an adjective.
“Better known” is not a number. “Stronger thought leadership” does not tell your team what should change. “Category leader” means very different things to a CEO, a brand leader, a demand generation team, and a sales organization.
That is where the tension begins.
Brand points to growing attention. Demand generation asks where the pipeline is. Sales wants more qualified opportunities. Finance wants evidence that the investment is contributing to revenue.
The problem is not brand versus demand.
The problem is that nobody agreed on what brand was supposed to accomplish.
The Dusty and Tanner version of brand measurement
When I take Dusty and Tanner to the dog park, they do not judge the experience the same way.
Dusty sees dogs, people, noise, movement, and hundreds of interesting smells. From his perspective, all that activity makes the walk a huge success.
Tanner is a little more practical.
Did we actually get somewhere?
Marketing teams often have the same disagreement.
Brand sees impressions, mentions, event attendance, video views, social engagement, and media coverage.
Demand generation looks at the same activity and asks, “Did any of this create pipeline?”
Both sides may have valid evidence. They are simply using different definitions of success.
That is why brand measurement has to begin before the campaign launches.
How do you measure whether brand marketing is working?
You measure brand marketing by defining a specific audience, establishing the current baseline, identifying the changes you expect brand activity to create, and connecting those changes to a larger business outcome.
In the Reframe stage of my Growth Framework, we put the brand objective on the whiteboard and walk it around the block.
Let’s say the objective is:
We want to become better known among CIOs at large manufacturing companies.
That is much better than saying, “We need more awareness.”
But the dog has not been walked yet.
First block: Establish the current brand baseline
Before setting a brand target, determine what is true today.
How many of the CIOs in your target market know your company? How many associate your brand with the problem you solve? How often do you appear in the channels, searches, publications, events, communities, podcasts, and analyst conversations they trust?
Possible baseline indicators include:
🐕 Aided and unaided awareness among the specific audience you need to influence
🐕 Branded search volume and the types of questions people ask about your company
🐕 Share of voice within the category, market, or problem area you want to own
🐕 Reach inside target accounts, not just total reach across an undifferentiated audience
🐕 Direct website traffic from the industries, companies, and regions that matter
🐕 Mentions and citations in publications, communities, podcasts, and analyst discussions trusted by your buyers
The audience definition matters.
Ten thousand impressions from people who will never influence a purchase are not automatically more valuable than 500 impressions from the CIOs, operations leaders, and technical evaluators inside your highest-value accounts.
Brand reach without audience relevance is just a bigger number.
Second block: Define what stronger awareness should change
Awareness is not usually the final business outcome. It is expected to change how potential customers think or behave.
If awareness increases among the right buyers, what should happen next?
You might expect:
🐕 More people to search for your company by name
🐕 More target accounts to visit your website directly
🐕 More members of the same buying committee to engage with your content
🐕 More prospects to recognize your company when sales reaches out
🐕 More buyers to associate your brand with a particular business problem
🐕 More prospects to include your company on an initial consideration list
🐕 Fewer sales conversations beginning with, “I have never heard of you”
These are measurable changes.
They also give brand and demand generation a shared view of progress. Brand can show that the company is becoming more familiar and relevant. Demand can evaluate whether that familiarity is producing meaningful engagement.
Third block: Connect brand to the business outcome
Suppose the company’s North-Star metric is qualified pipeline from enterprise accounts.
Brand does not need to receive direct attribution for every opportunity. However, it should help make qualified opportunities easier to create, accelerate, and win.
That distinction is critical.
Brand does not become valuable only when somebody clicks an advertisement and immediately fills out a form. That standard ignores the way enterprise buying decisions actually develop across multiple people, channels, and interactions.
At the same time, saying “brand is difficult to measure” cannot become permission to measure nothing.
The better question is:
What evidence would tell us that brand is making pipeline easier to create and revenue easier to win?
That evidence might include greater engagement across target accounts, more inbound interest from the ideal customer profile, stronger conversion from first meeting to qualified opportunity, improved competitive win rates, shorter sales cycles, or fewer prospects entering sales conversations with no prior knowledge of the company.
No single metric proves brand impact by itself. Together, however, these indicators can show whether the market is moving in the intended direction.
Fourth block: Build the brand measurement progression
During Reframe, define the progression you expect buyers to follow.
🐕 Awareness: Do the right buyers know that you exist?
🐕 Consideration: Do they understand the problem you solve and see you as a credible option?
🐕 Preference: Do they favor your company or include it on their shortlist?
🐕 Engagement: Are the right people spending time with your content, experts, events, or sales team?
🐕 Pipeline: Is that engagement producing more qualified opportunities or helping existing opportunities advance?
🐕 Revenue: Are you improving win rates, sales velocity, deal value, retention, or expansion?
Each stage should have a small number of indicators.
Do not build a scorecard with 40 metrics that nobody can interpret. Choose the measurements that help the team determine whether the strategy is working and what to change when it is not.
For more resources visit my Substack here.
What should go on a brand scorecard?
A useful brand scorecard should contain a mix of leading and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators tell you whether the audience is beginning to notice and engage with the brand. These could include target-account reach, branded search, direct traffic, executive engagement, content consumption, and repeat visits.
Mid-funnel indicators tell you whether awareness is becoming consideration or preference. These could include buying-group engagement, inclusion on shortlists, sales recognition, return visits from target accounts, or engagement with higher-intent content.
Lagging indicators connect brand progress to commercial performance. These could include qualified pipeline, opportunity progression, win rate, deal velocity, customer acquisition efficiency, and revenue.
The scorecard also needs four pieces of operating discipline:
🐕 A baseline that shows where the company is starting
🐕 A target that defines what meaningful progress looks like
🐕 A timeframe for reaching that target
🐕 An owner and review cadence so the findings lead to decisions
Without those elements, you have a report, not a management system.
A practical B2B brand measurement example
Imagine a B2B technology company wants to become better known among CIOs at large manufacturing companies.
Its commercial objective is to increase qualified enterprise pipeline from a defined list of manufacturing accounts.
A hypothetical scorecard could include:
🐕 Increase awareness among the target CIO audience from 18 percent to 28 percent within 12 months
🐕 Grow branded search from target markets by 20 percent
🐕 Increase the number of target accounts with engagement from multiple buying-group members
🐕 Increase direct traffic and repeat visits from named accounts
🐕 Reduce the percentage of first sales meetings in which prospects say they are unfamiliar with the company
🐕 Improve conversion from initial meeting to qualified opportunity
🐕 Improve competitive win rate within the target segment
These numbers are illustrative. The actual targets must come from the company’s baseline, market position, investment level, and growth model.
The point is to define the expected chain of movement.
If awareness increases but target-account engagement does not, the message may not be relevant.
If engagement increases but qualified pipeline does not, the offer, audience, or conversion path may be wrong.
If pipeline grows but win rates remain flat, the company may have a preference, differentiation, product, or sales execution problem.
Measurement should help you diagnose the next constraint, not merely prove that marketing was busy.
Brand and demand should share the same scoreboard
Brand and demand generation are not opposing strategies.
Brand helps create familiarity, relevance, trust, and preference. Demand generation gives interested buyers a reason and a path to act. Sales turns that interest into a commercial conversation.
The functions should contribute to the same growth outcome, even when their individual metrics are different.
Brand should not have to pretend that every impression created a lead.
Demand should not receive all the credit simply because its form or advertisement happened to capture the final click.
Instead, both teams should be able to explain:
🐕 Who they are trying to influence
🐕 What change they are trying to create
🐕 How that change will be measured
🐕 How it contributes to the North-Star metric
🐕 What they will do if the expected movement does not occur
That is a much more useful conversation than arguing about whether brand or demand deserves the budget.
Move from reporting activity to managing outcomes
A brand dashboard should not be a collection of large numbers designed to make everyone feel good.
It should help leadership make decisions.
Should the company continue investing in the current message? Is awareness increasing among the right audience? Are target accounts moving from recognition to consideration? Is greater familiarity improving sales conversations? Is the brand helping the company enter, advance, or win more of the opportunities it wants?
If the dashboard cannot help answer those questions, it is not yet a scoreboard.
It is a scrapbook.
Bring the dog home
Walking the dog does not end when the team fills the whiteboard.
The dog comes home when somebody owns the actions.
Agree on the audience. Establish the baseline. Set the targets. Assign the owners. Decide how often the scorecard will be reviewed. Document what the team will change when an indicator stalls.
That is the point of Reframe.
It is not about forcing every brand investment to behave like a demand-generation advertisement.
It is about making every major investment accountable to an outcome.
Brand can create value before a prospect clicks, converts, or talks to sales.
But if the organization cannot explain what brand is expected to change, it will never know whether that value is being created.
Move from brand vibes to numbers on the scoreboard.
Dog walked.
Learn more by watching the video below.
