Brand acts as an accelerant and a sustainer

• Look at funnel performance along various seasons of branding lifecycles, particularly before and after branding work (like an elevation or refresh)
• Compare funnel performance to direct competitors representing a mix of brand strengths

The organizations Whiteboard partners with, both for-profit and nonprofit, are looking to make smart investments that prove their worth. They want to know the ROI of the project.

But, an asset like a brand exists to serve multiple organizational and departmental strategies. As such, it’s doing a lot of lifting in a lot of places. Not to mention, brand is a bit of an abstraction, especially compared to that product-line extension. This makes brand more difficult to track with traditional ROI thinking.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t measure a return; you just need to shift how you think about the investment.

​​The thoughts below suggest three lenses that shift ROI thinking around brand, each with a respective set of metrics. Although in reality, there’s natural cross-over between the tools and tactics used — we’re streamlining and forcing separation for the sake of simplicity.

Brand acts as an accelerant and a sustainer

Pre v Post of the brand optimization: Look at funnel performance along various seasons of branding lifecycles, particularly before and after branding work (like an elevation or refresh)

Direct industry analogs: Compare funnel performance to direct competitors representing a mix of brand strengths

Brand health matters

When branding, we think of value in relationship to the brand’s equity. The healthier the brand, the stronger the equity, the stronger the equity, the more value the brand brings to the organization.

Author and UCLA professor David Aaker suggests that you can track Brand Equity along five dimensions that each attribute to the overall health of a brand: