Here's the truth about most brand health tracking, it produces numbers that marketing teams find interesting but finance teams find irrelevant.

Awareness is up 3 points. Consideration improved among 25-34 year olds. Brand sentiment shifted from neutral to slightly positive. These metrics might get a polite nod in a quarterly review, but they won't convince a CFO to protect your marketing budget when costs need cutting or give you ammunition to push back on aggressive promotional calendars.

The disconnect exists because most brand metrics aren't connected to the outcomes finance actually cares about: margin, volume, and the relationship between them. Yet research consistently shows that brand strength is one of the most powerful predictors of commercial resilience. Strong brands can charge prices up to twice those of weaker competitors. McCain reduced its price elasticity by 47% over nine years through consistent brand investment, raising base sales by 44%. A skincare brand generated an extra 5% in revenue by increasing its pricing power, with 76% of that gain directly attributable to marketing investment.

The problem isn't that brand doesn't matter to commercial outcomes. The problem is that we're measuring the wrong things and presenting them in the wrong language.

The Four Brand Signals That Predict Commercial Performance

If you want brand metrics that finance will take seriously, focus on signals that have demonstrated, quantifiable relationships with pricing power and sales performance. These aren't abstract brand health indicators. They're leading signals of margin and volume.

Mental availability and share of search

Mental availability measures how easily your brand comes to mind when customers enter a buying situation. It's the foundation of brand strength because a brand that isn't thought of can't be chosen. But mental availability as a concept can feel abstract to finance teams. That's where share of search becomes valuable.

Share of search measures the proportion of branded searches in your category that go to your brand versus competitors. Research by Les Binet and others has demonstrated an 83% correlation between share of search and market share across multiple categories and countries. It's a leading indicator, meaning changes in share of search typically precede changes in market share by several months.

For finance teams, the connection is clear, if share of search is declining while market share holds steady, you're likely borrowing from future performance. If share of search is rising, you have evidence that investments are building future demand. This is measurable data that can be tracked monthly and connected to sales forecasts.

Perceived value and quality-to-price relationship

Perceived value isn't about being cheap. It's about whether customers believe your offering is worth what you charge. This is the metric most directly connected to pricing power and promotional reliance.

Kantar research shows that 94% of a brand's pricing power is explained by how meaningfully different it is perceived to be. Brands with strong perceived value can raise prices with minimal volume loss. Brands with weak perceived value face a choice: accept lower margins or rely on promotions to drive volume.

Track perceived value through research that measures quality perceptions relative to price, fairness perceptions, and willingness to pay. When perceived value trends downward, it's an early warning that you're heading toward margin pressure or promotional dependency. When it trends upward, you have evidence to support price increases or reduced promotional depth.

Distinctive asset recognition

Distinctive assets are the visual, verbal, and sonic elements that customers associate with your brand: logos, colours, characters, taglines, sounds. Strong distinctive assets do commercial work by helping customers recognise your brand at shelf, in search results, and across advertising touchpoints.

Measure distinctive asset strength through recognition testing. Can customers correctly attribute your assets to your brand? How quickly? In cluttered environments? The commercial connection is conversion efficiency: brands with strong distinctive assets convert more of their mental availability into actual purchase because customers can find and identify them more easily.

For finance, this translates to media efficiency. Strong distinctive assets mean your advertising works harder because customers make the brand connection faster. Weak distinctive assets mean you need more frequency and spend to achieve the same effect.

Consideration within key buyer modes

Generic consideration metrics have limited value because they don't reflect how customers actually make decisions. What matters is consideration within specific buying situations or need states.

If you sell insurance, being considered when someone is shopping for comprehensive coverage is different from being considered when someone needs quick third-party cover. If you sell groceries, being considered for a weekly family shop is different from being considered for a quick convenience trip. These different buyer modes have different competitive sets, different price sensitivities, and different margin implications.

Track consideration within the buyer modes that matter most to your business. This gives you actionable insight into where you're winning and losing, and helps finance understand which customer segments are driving or dragging performance.

Building Scenarios Your CFO Will Back

Brand metrics become commercially useful when you can connect them to revenue and margin scenarios. This requires building models that translate brand shifts into financial outcomes.

Sensitivity tables that link consideration to revenue

Build a sensitivity table that shows expected revenue impact for different consideration scenarios. If consideration in your primary buyer mode increases by 5 points, what's the expected revenue range? If it drops by 5 points?

This requires understanding your historical conversion rates from consideration to purchase, your average transaction value, and your customer frequency. The model doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be directionally useful and grounded in real data.

Present this as a range rather than a point estimate. Finance teams understand uncertainty. What they don't tolerate is vague assertions that can't be connected to numbers. A statement like "if consideration holds steady, we expect H2 revenue between $X and $Y, but a 5-point decline would shift that range to $A-$B" gives them something to work with in planning.

Elasticity guardrails from perceived value trends

Price elasticity measures how much volume you lose when you raise prices (or gain when you lower them). Brands with strong perceived value have lower elasticity, meaning they can adjust prices with less volume impact.

Track your perceived value metrics over time and correlate them with actual price elasticity from your sales data. This builds a model that lets you set elasticity guardrails for pricing decisions. If perceived value is trending up, you have more room to raise prices. If it's trending down, price increases will cost you more volume than historical averages suggest.

Research from Google and Kantar found that moving away from promotion-heavy communication toward balanced brand building can reduce price elasticity by up to 20% over time. That's a material margin improvement that compounds year over year.

Promo reliance index versus baseline media weight

Track your promotional reliance: what percentage of your volume is sold on promotion versus at full price? Benchmark data suggests that 94% of promotions fail to increase overall category value, and on average 35% of promotional sales are subsidised purchases from customers who would have bought at full price anyway.

Compare promotional reliance against baseline media weight over time. When you increase brand-building media investment, does promotional reliance decrease in subsequent quarters? If so, you have evidence that brand investment reduces discount dependency. If not, you may be over-relying on promotions to drive volume regardless of brand health.

ASOS provides a useful case study here. They deliberately reduced site-wide promotions so that 60% of sales occurred without discounting, accepting short-term margin pressure to break the discount dependency cycle and stabilise brand positioning.

The Action Playbook When Signals Soften

When your brand metrics show weakness, the instinct is often to increase promotional activity to maintain volume. This is usually counterproductive. Promotions train customers to wait for discounts, erode perceived value, and create a cycle that's increasingly expensive to escape.

Instead, use softening brand signals as a trigger for strategic intervention.

Reweight media toward memory-building channels: When perceived value dips, shift media investment toward channels that build long-term brand associations rather than driving immediate conversion. Video advertising has proven particularly effective at building both brand metrics and short-term sales simultaneously. The goal is to rebuild the mental structures that justify your price point before the P&L pain shows up.

Run fewer, bigger, clearer promotional events: If you must discount, concentrate promotional activity into fewer, more impactful events tied to genuine category entry points rather than spreading shallow discounts across the calendar. A meaningful discount during a moment when customers are naturally entering your category is more effective than constant small promotions that train discount-waiting behaviour.

Reduce friction on price-justifying features: Often the features that justify your price point aren't visible or accessible enough to customers. Review your customer experience for friction points that prevent customers from experiencing the value they're paying for. Sometimes the problem isn't price perception but value delivery.

Making This Work in Practice

Marketing Week's 2025 Language of Effectiveness research found that while 88% of marketers believe strong brands can charge higher prices, only 40% can quantify the relationship between brand strength and price elasticity. That gap is the opportunity.

Start by identifying which of the four signals matters most for your business. For some categories, share of search will be the leading indicator. For others, perceived value trends will be more predictive. Build measurement around your priority signals first, then expand.

Work with finance to agree on the model that connects brand shifts to revenue scenarios. This doesn't need to be econometrically perfect on day one. It needs to be a shared framework that both marketing and finance are willing to track and refine over time.

Report brand metrics in financial language. Instead of saying "awareness increased," say "share of search increased by 2 points, which historically correlates with a 3-6 month lag to market share improvement of approximately X." Instead of "brand perception improved," say "perceived value trending up suggests we have room to reduce promotional depth by Y% without volume loss."

Brand Evidence as Insurance

The brands that will navigate uncertain economic conditions best aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones that can demonstrate, with evidence, how brand investment protects and grows commercial performance.

That evidence doesn't come from traditional brand tracking reports that sit in a drawer. It comes from metrics that are connected to financial outcomes, tracked consistently, and presented in language that commercial stakeholders understand and trust.

When your CFO asks why they should protect marketing spend in a tough quarter, you need an answer better than "brand matters." You need to show them exactly which brand signals are predicting margin health, how those signals connect to revenue scenarios, and what happens to the business if brand investment stops.

That's the conversation worth having before H2 planning starts.

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