The Greatest Missed Opportunity in Marketing Measurement

Or perhaps the greatest failure

For fifty years, the marketing measurement industry has excelled at one thing: failing to prove the value of brand marketing.

It’s a bold claim, sure, and coming from someone who’s been measuring the brand impact of advertising for almost 3 decades probably seems odd. But it’s a strangely quiet crisis. Entire CMOs have come and gone while brand budgets ballooned, got slashed, got defended, then ballooned again often without anyone able to say with confidence: "This brand campaign drove this business result."

The value of brand comes down to a feeling, or at best some hand wavy measurement that shows people know and like a particular brand but provides little connective tissue to the actual in market performance of the parent company.

Why does this matter? Because when we can't measure something, we can't protect it. And in today's environment where CFOs demand deterministic ROI and startups out-iterate Fortune 500s, brand is destined to becomes the first casualty.

Brand as a Vibe, Not a Variable

In the boardroom, brand gets defended with phrases like "long-term equity," "mental availability," or "top-of-mind awareness." All true, all frustratingly abstract. Compare that with a performance marketer walking in with a dashboard of cost-per-acquisition figures and cohort retention curves.

The imbalance is glaring and it’s our own fault.

Academic heavyweights like Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have long argued for a more scientific, evidence-based approach to brand marketing. Yet even their work gets misapplied in practice. Mental availability is important but what drives it? Is distinctiveness or differentiation more important? How should it be measured across categories as diverse as cloud computing and frozen lasagna?

The reality is, most models treat brand marketing as if it's a universal constant. But do we really believe that what it takes for Apple to succeed should be applied wholesale to Lean Cuisine?

The One-Size-Fits-All Fallacy

This is where the industry has utterly failed: in developing measurement frameworks that are sensitive to context.

Scott Galloway, in his lectures and books, repeatedly emphasizes that brand is both a moat and a multiplier but not the same kind of moat or multiplier in every case. Rory Sutherland pushes this further, arguing that the irrationality of human behavior means that strict ROI calculations often miss the point entirely.

Mark Ritson, always delightfully blunt, says most marketers wouldn't know brand equity if it bit them in the NPS.

He’s not wrong. Because we keep trying to build grand unifying theories of brand when the world is more chaotic than ever. We live in a hyper-fragmented, hyper-competitive environment. TikTok can build a billion-dollar brand in a year. Consumer trust in institutions is eroding. The idea that a single framework can guide both Google and Go-Gurt is laughable.

Maybe the real issue is that we’ve collapsed the distinction between products and brands. Amazon, for instance, may have quietly eroded brand value by reducing it to a 1–5 star rating on a product you can try in two days and return the next without ever stepping foot in a store. In that world, convenience and consensus have replaced emotional connection and loyalty. The power of the brand is now disintermediated by the power of the platform.

So What Should We Do?

Let’s propose something sacrilegious: maybe we don’t need a single framework. Maybe we need a layered, probabilistic model, one that blends category heuristics, behavioral data, and signal-rich attribution (including econometrics and controlled experiments).

Maybe we build a Brand Operating System:

1. Category Context: Start by mapping what "brand" means in your space. For a bank, it may mean trust. For a soft drink, it may mean lifestyle. For a SaaS tool, it may mean security and uptime.

2. Signal Stack: Blend multiple weak signals into a stronger whole: search trends, unaided recall, share of search (which Hormozi and others use as a leading indicator), organic branded traffic, and pricing power.

3. Econometric Layer: Where feasible, use MMM or time-series regression models to identify brand-related lift. Run geo-split tests or RCT if you can.

4. Human Judgment: Add a qualitative layer informed by behavioral science. This is where Sutherland’s work shines: pay attention to anomalies, outliers, and emotionally resonant effects.

5. Benchmark and Iterate: Set hypotheses, test them, and improve over time. Don’t assume the model built for Coca-Cola works for your DTC protein bar.

Most importantly build a brand model for each brand, not some one size fits all measurement philosphy. Getting there requires a shift, not just in tools, but in mindset. Measurement needs to move from post-rationalization to proactive design. Instead of retrofitting ROI after a campaign, marketers should embed measurement thinking from the start. Set up testable hypotheses around brand impact. Structure campaigns so they create variability in media, message, or market then measure the delta.

Brand lift studies alone won’t cut it. We need to combine them with experimental design, econometrics, digital proxies like share of search, and an honest reckoning with the limits of attribution. Cross-functional teams: brand, performance, analytics, must align on what success looks like, and how it will be measured. Only then do we start inching toward a world where brand value is provable, not just plausible.

But what if it’s not even that? Let’s go a step further: what if brand value is ultimately unprovable?

Brand effects accrue slowly, diffusely, and unpredictably. They emerge from years of accumulated impressions, not single-point conversions. Trying to draw a direct line between a brand ad seen 18 months ago and a sale today is like trying to drop a trending TikTok catchphrase into a conversation two years too late it only shows how little you understand the culture.

So what do we do? Because despite this unprovability, we feel the power of brand. We see it in Nike’s cultural relevance, in Apple's pricing power, in Patagonia's customer loyalty. We know it’s real. But in an era where marketing is experiencing its biggest renaissance of measurability, often driven by the CFO, there’s a risk. That renaissance is overwhelmingly anchored to short-term sales metrics. And when those metrics dominate, the brand gets edged out.

The tragedy isn’t that we can’t measure brand perfectly. It’s that we’re letting imperfect short-term metrics define our long-term strategy. The very systems we’ve built to measure marketing may be pushing us further from the kinds of advertising that make brands unforgettable. And unfortunately, those measurements scale extremely well, when we try and scale brand measurement we end up with watered down unifying theories of brand that provide little overall value.

Brand is Not Dead, Just Misunderstood

The marketing measurement industry hasn’t failed for lack of intelligence, it’s failed for lack of imagination. It tried to fit a nonlinear, emotional, socially-embedded phenomenon into tidy boxes.

The future isn't about finding the perfect model. It's about building adaptive, evidence-driven approaches that respect the complexity of brand in the real world.

To get there, marketers need to bring the CFO into the conversation, not just as a gatekeeper of budget, but as a strategic partner. That means respecting their intelligence and business acumen. Don’t just shove a tracker report or off-the-shelf brand equity model at them, invite them into the process of building a brand operating system that is as rigorous and accountable as any financial model.

The key is to translate brand-building into financial language. Highlight how strong brands reduce price sensitivity, increase customer lifetime value, improve retention, and lower acquisition costs over time. Frame investments in brand measurement not as costs, but as risk mitigation, ensuring future revenue streams by better understanding the long-term effects of marketing.

Showing the CFO that the absence of brand metrics is itself a financial blind spot can open the door. If brand equity is one of the largest drivers of enterprise value, then investing in ways to track, test, and build it becomes not a luxury, but a necessity.

If we can do that, maybe we’ll finally prove what every great marketer already knows: brands matter. But even if we can’t definitively prove their value, we can absolutely make them more accountable. By designing smarter systems, aligning on shared goals, and embedding measurement into the brand-building process itself, we shift the conversation from belief to evidence, from faith to stewardship. And that, in the end, is a much more powerful place to be.