Measuring the impact of brand on revenue growth

In the 1950s, the discipline of “brand management” first emerged. Companies like Procter and Gamble and Unilever began to focus on the product “identity” as a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace of competitors and create emotional value, in addition to functional (The Atlantic, 2011). 

And while most would agree that strong brands inherently drive financial results, accurately measuring the impact on brand has confounded marketing leaders for decades.  Agencies such as Kantar Millward Brown have built entire practices around brand equity models, and even organizations such as ISO and MASB have worked to establish standards for measuring the financial value of brand. Yet for most, clarity of ROI on brand investments has remained elusive.

This challenge has been accentuated with the onset of digital transformation initiatives. With so much digital channel data, marketers developed attribution models that clearly measured the impact of their digital marketing efforts.  A discipline called “performance marketing” even emerged in the B2B space, a separate function from implied “non-performance” marketing. 

Brand was largely left behind in these advancements in measurement and impact, relying on slow and costly surveys, brand trackers, or myopic proxy metrics. Without these insights and ROI intelligence, CMOs have become less focused on building the brand and more beholden to the tyranny of the MQL. The problem is, this is a shortsighted approach to driving long-term, durable growth. And it’s a large factor in why we’ve seen the lowest average tenure of CMOs in a decade (Spencer Stuart, 2022), as marketing leaders struggle to demonstrate long-term results.

BlueOcean has pioneered the category of Brand Intelligence to address this challenge. The category is founded on a fundamental belief that your brand is not some separate function from the rest of your marketing.  Your brand represents how your go-to-market strategy comes together to build a lasting relationship with your customers across countless touch points. And brand is how you drive long-term, durable growth for your organization. With that premise, Brand Intelligence leverages software and services to transform brand, integrated marketing, channel, and competitive data into actionable insights that inform an organization’s go-to-market decisions and help quantify the impact of your marketing on your brand health.

Given the persistence of the question “what is the impact of brand on revenue growth,” the data science team at BlueOcean set out to answer this exact question. With over 6,000 brands analyzed in the BlueOcean brand intelligence platform, they were able to identify which brand metrics were most correlated with revenue growth, and what emerged may surprise you.  

This data report will dive deeper into each of these brand metrics, as well as some practical guidance on how marketing leaders can influence these metrics to build a stronger brand and drive revenue growth for their organizations.