Brand health metrics are stuck in the past. Traditional measures like usage, awareness and Net Promoter Score (NPS) barely scratch the surface of a brand’s true essence. CMOs need a more nuanced approach to gauge brand performance as markets evolve at breakneck speed.

Living in the Past

But while it is a great attention-grabbing title, brand loyalty is not dead. A new generation (no matter which one you’re referring to) has not abandoned loving brands, being inspired by brands, hating brands or being indifferent to brands. Let’s just say that people have complicated relationships with brands. However, we know brand loyalty has inherent value, which is still a driver of company success and revenue growth. So, instead of abandoning brand metrics, we need a serious update. Most brands are long past due for the metrics glow-up.

Understanding Brand Strength

The simple fact is that more successful brands are higher-performing brands. But we must understand that performance—codify it, measure it and reflect on it over time to trigger the right actions for continual growth.

Strong brands know how to press the right levers to create brand affinity that produces powerful staying power to keep good customers for years and years. They know that strong connections with consumers foster loyalty and loyal customers are not just buyers; they are brand advocates. Strong brands know that the lifetime value of a connected customer keeps sales steady and reduces acquisition costs with their powerful word-of-mouth advocacy.

In pursuit of this high lifetime value client, brands need to measure what they can to maximize their strengths and weaknesses, real or perceived in the mind of the consumer. Brands need empirical evidence to understand how to outperform their competitors and know which actions they are taking are making the most impact toward building trust.

While some may ask, “What’s trust got to do with it?” The research shows that connection to a brand is, at its core, a function of trust. It’s the feeling a customer has that your brand will deliver on its promises and meet their needs. This trust is intimately tied to identity – customers choose brands that align with and enhance their self-image. This isn’t just feel-good brand marketing; it’s a fundamental driver of brand success.

The Human Truth About Brands

Brands exist solely in the human mind. They’re built on trust, shaped by emotions and driven by identity. Yet, most metrics fail to capture these crucial elements. While they may seem elusive, they can be identified and understood.

True brand health boils down to three factors:

Connection: Does the brand resonate with my lived experience?
Individuals interface with the world only in how it relates to them. Brands need to align with this reality and understand people are looking for products to help them, elevate their identity, increase their satisfaction, satiate some needs, or create some feelings they desire. Connection is incredibly important in brand messaging because it is the narrative the consumer will either accept or reject based on their own internal interpretation and judgments.

The moral of the story here is simple–better brands are better at creating and sustaining human connections. Higher-performing brands like Coke, RAM, Target, Vanguard and others manage to connect with consumers on a deeper, richer level that taps into people’s lived experiences. A notable example is Brandtrust’s work for Kraft Mac & Cheese a few years ago, which breathed new energy into sales by tapping into the deep feelings of comfort many have associated with the brand since childhood. Kraft simply needed to remind consumers more often of their cherished experiences with the brand. Brand connection drives loyalty, and loyalty drives performance.

Consistency: Can I trust the brand to deliver on its promises?
Much of what is being processed about a brand happens in the non-conscious parts of the brain. That human function is incredibly good at picking up on subtle patterns of inconsistencies. When it comes to brands, even if we don’t vocalize our distaste, our brain can see the gap between what was promised and what was delivered and sends emotional cues to help us make split-second decisions throughout the buyer’s journey.

The work we did for Loyola University Hospital yielded that the essence of the brand was consistency of care. With deeper emotional branding work, we uncovered stories like patients who noticed they didn’t have dust on their plants. This led one patient to conclude they would apply the same care to their patients. Consistency works on the adage, “How you do anything is how you do everything,” and demonstrates how a small behavior makes a big impact.

Care: Does the brand care about me or others?
In any relationship, people often say, “It’s the little things that matter.” In terms of brand strength, we know this to be true. Companies need ways to assess what little things draw customers in or turn them away. Brands exist in human minds that long for kindnesses and considerations that surprise and delight. They want to know they matter and the causes they love matter. When done right, brands can show they care in incredibly small, often inexpensive ways that produce big returns.

This story should be about how only a few exceptional actions create powerful narratives shared repeatedly by loyal customers. This human imperative to amplify truly remarkable service or product can be leveraged at little or no cost, but it answers a pressing need: humans have to know if brands care about them or just want to sell them something.

Social science has helped us realize how important the brand experience is. Because the lived experience is how brand connections are created and sustained, the experience becomes the brand. This is particularly true with service brands.

We often track what are known as “Peak-End” moments along the customer’s journey. We’ve discovered the human truth that great brand experiences often boil down to a few “peak moments. For example, several years ago, we discovered that FedEx customers did not ship items simply because they didn’t have packaging materials in the workplace. That situation created a negative Peak moment and a frustrating psychological barrier. We researched and tested potential solutions and then created the Overnite Box and tube shipping supplies to be supplied to FedEx customers free of charge. It would be fair to say it changed the shipping business “overnight.”

The human truth is often overlooked when trying to get to the truth about a brand. So much research is focused on uncovering what people do and why they do it. This behavioral science approach is great, but the human truth about brands cannot be answered through actions and explanations. The human truth about brands centers around what people feel and why they feel that way. It would have been easy and predictable for FedEx to believe it would be too expensive to provide free shipping materials, but the psychological barrier would never have been removed.

The Pitfalls of Outdated Metrics

Many organizations cling to familiar metrics, even when they provide little actionable insight. CMOs often find themselves trapped by leadership’s attachment to outdated KPIs, needing help to allocate resources to more impactful research. Traditional brand trackers that do not address feelings are not evaluating the root cause of the brand outcomes and to that end they are not useful.

Insert here how much you spend on brand trackers, which are proving to be basic rearview mirrors reporting on past performance but not providing any indicators of what is coming up in front of a brand – where the opportunities lie for increased connection, consistency or care to move the needle. In short, understanding what is happening is not directly helpful in understanding what to do about it.

A New Approach to Brand Health Tracking

We can continue to develop strategies on how to measure brand awareness, but if the answer provides no clear path to increase that awareness, the effort is pointless. For brands to change their tactics and begin tapping into the emotional realities of a brand, the two most important things to understand are the strong correlation between loyalty and affinity. Strong brands can start to measure specifics around the three C’s: connection, consistency and care. These metrics should provide not only truths, but inherent actions that can be taken to accentuate the positive of each. Moving into metrics that fundamentally see brands as a function of consumer feelings and not logical facts is the best approach for changing times.

Without this focus on emotions and how they create loyalty and affinity, brands are stuck reading outdated reports providing clarity on which competitor is eating their lunch.

The Future of Brand Health Tracking

The path forward lies in combining human truth with technological advancement. But even with technology, especially the use of artificial intelligence, large language models and even synthetic respondents are only going to yield answers to the questions we ask. This means the quality of our questions matters greatly. By understanding the deep emotional connections that drive brand relationships, we can ask these questions, which will give us a pathway forward to increasing the brand’s overall health. CMOs and stakeholders across every part of your organization need deeper truths to guide the continual reshaping of the brand.

Your brand isn’t a part of your business. It is your business. It’s time our metrics reflected that reality.