How smart marketers use brand health data to grow revenue

Many brand tracking programs generate plenty of data but still struggle to answer the question that matters most: What should we do next based on this data?

Brand health metrics are most useful when they’re connected to business outcomes. For example, Nielsen found that a one-point increase in brand metrics like awareness and consideration is associated with an average 1% increase in sales. And for large organizations, a 1% increase on a billion dollars is significant.

But the goal isn’t to draw a straight line from a single metric to revenue, because it’s not that simple. Brand tracking ROI comes from understanding how changes in awareness, consideration, preference and brand equity relate to customer behavior and commercial performance over time.

In this article, I’ll look at how to turn those brand signals into smarter decisions about investment, acquisition, pricing and growth.

Teams can track brand health data like awareness, consideration and preference, but those numbers don’t automatically tell a CMO what to do next. Instead, they sit in a spreadsheet, and it’s up to someone to turn them into action.

Reporting without action

The point of data is to help you make more informed decisions. If your brand health dashboard shows awareness rose from 58% to 63%, that’s interesting. If you do nothing with that information, it’s not helpful. But if you are able to use that data to dig deeper and uncover that  awareness grew in the markets with increased media spend, that’s useful.   

Focusing solely on metrics instead of outcomes

Brand health tracking often includes umbrella metrics like “increased awareness,” but that can sound fuzzy. What business outcome does “awareness” support? 

Different growth concerns call for different metrics.

• A challenger brand with low awareness may need to expand mental availability and reach. 

• An established brand with high awareness but low consideration may have a relevance, differentiation or perception problem.

• A premium brand may care more about preference, differentiation and pricing power than adding another point of awareness.

There’s no “one-size-fits-all” brand health metric. Instead, it’s best to identify your goal and then use the appropriate brand signals to tell you whether you’re moving in the right direction. 

Misalignment between brand and finance teams

It’s not surprising that marketing and finance teams evaluate performance through different lenses. Brand and insights teams value awareness, consideration and equity, while finance focuses on revenue and market share. 

It’s essential to build a bridge between these viewpoints so brand metrics don’t appear as a “nice to have” but as critical to long-term success. Connecting brand metrics and revenue can also help finance teams understand how changes in brand health contribute to brand revenue over time. 

In fact, brand health metrics can offer evidence that finance cares about if you have the right data and know how to interpret it. Once teams agree on the outcomes they’re trying to influence, the next question is which brand metrics can provide the most useful signals. 

Not every brand metric matters equally at every stage of growth. The most useful question to ask is what does this metric tell us about our ability to generate demand, win customers or protect revenue? 

Brand awareness

Brand awareness metrics tell you whether enough potential buyers know your brand exists. That makes it particularly important when growth depends on reaching new customers, entering a new market or increasing adoption in an existing one.

But keep in mind, more awareness doesn't always translate into more customers. If awareness climbs while consideration stays flat, the problem may lie elsewhere.

For instance, if your brand awareness rises from 60% to 75% after a big campaign, but consideration stays flat at 25%, that may signal reach may no longer be the biggest barrier to growth. The next step is understanding what is keeping those consumers from considering the brand. 

Brand consideration

Brand consideration metrics get closer to potential demand by showing whether consumers who know your brand would seriously consider choosing it.

Nielsen's research supports the commercial importance of this relationship. Its analysis found that gains in awareness and consideration are associated with future sales and can improve the efficiency of lower-funnel marketing activity.

Tracking consideration over time can provide an early signal of where future demand may be strengthening or weakening, allowing marketers to respond before the full effect appears in sales. 

Brand preference

Brand preference shows how you stack up when customers have other options. If plenty of people consider your brand but relatively few prefer it, getting onto the shortlist isn't the problem. A more useful question is why they're choosing someone else. 

Brand salience

Knowing your brand and thinking of it when it's time to buy aren't the same thing. Brand salience measures the latter. Ehrenberg-Bass calls this mental availability: how easily a brand comes to mind in a buying situation. 

That makes salience different from simple awareness. A customer may recognize your brand but fail to think of it when a specific need arises. Tracking salience can help identify the buying situations where your brand is mentally competitive — and where competitors are more likely to come to mind.

Brand equity

Brand equity captures the additional commercial strength created by what consumers think and feel about your brand.

For marketers, that makes brand equity measurement more than a long-term brand score. Understanding the relationship between brand equity and revenue can help teams assess whether the brand is positioned to generate demand, support premium pricing and contribute to future growth.

Tracking brand health tells you where your brand stands in the minds of consumers. The next step is using those signals to decide where to invest, what to change and which opportunities to pursue.

The key is to look for patterns across metrics rather than treating a single movement as an instruction. A drop in consideration, for example, doesn't automatically mean cut media spend. It signals what's changed and gives you something specific to investigate. 

Media investment decisions

Brand health data can help marketers identify where additional media investment is likely to have the greatest impact.

For SoFi, putting consumer data into the hands of decision-makers has helped the company make faster advertising decisions and build confidence in brand investment. CMO Lauren Stafford-Webb says, “We’ve been able to grow our investment in the brand through the confidence we get from the Zappi data.” SoFi also reports improving overall ad effectiveness by more than 20% while working with Zappi.

The important point isn't that one brand metric dictates how much to spend. Brand data gives marketers evidence to use alongside campaign performance to decide whether to invest more, adjust the work or investigate further.

Customer acquisition strategy

Rising acquisition costs aren't always an acquisition-channel problem. Weak awareness, consideration or relevance can make performance marketing work harder because fewer consumers already know or want the brand.

Zappi’s Brand Health Tracker methodology uses consideration as an indicator of sales potential. Looking at changes in consideration alongside acquisition data can help marketers identify where potential customers may be dropping out before purchase. 

Looking at brand health alongside marketing performance metrics gives marketers more context. If consideration is falling and customer acquisition cost (CAC) is rising, for example, the next step might be investigating changing brand perceptions rather than simply optimizing ad spend.

Connecting brand health with commercial outcomes such as sales or penetration helps teams determine whether those relationships are consistent enough to inform future decisions. 

Pricing decisions

Brand health can provide useful context for pricing decisions, particularly when measures such as preference, differentiation or perceived value are strengthening or weakening.

But brand tracking shouldn't replace pricing research. If brand health suggests consumers see your brand as distinctive and worth paying more for, the next step is to test that hypothesis.

Zappi's pricing research measures acceptable price ranges, willingness to pay a premium and how proposed prices affect purchase intent. Used together, the two types of research answer different questions: brand health can tell you whether consumer perceptions appear to support premium pricing; pricing research can tell you what consumers are actually willing to pay.

Market expansion decisions

Overall brand health can hide major differences between markets and audiences. Before expanding, look at how well the brand is known, considered and perceived among the people you want to reach next.

If your brand has 70% awareness nationally but only 30% among the audience you're targeting in a new market, then the national number makes the brand look expansion-ready while the segment-level data tells a different story.

Tracking the new market over time can then show whether growing awareness is translating into consideration and whether the brand’s competitive position is strengthening. 

Product launch decisions

Brand health can also provide context for innovation decisions. A promising product concept still has to fit what consumers expect and believe about the brand launching it.

Look at the associations consumers already have with your brand. Do they support the benefit your new product promises? Does the brand have credibility in the category or occasion you're entering? And are there perceptions that could create a barrier to trial?

Connecting brand tracking with innovation research gives teams a fuller picture. Marketers can see whether the concept resonates with consumers while brand data helps you understand whether your brand is well positioned to deliver it.

Connecting brand health to revenue doesn't mean proving that a two-point increase in awareness caused a specific sales increase. Instead, look for consistent relationships between what consumers think, what they do and what happens in the business. 

Leading indicators

Brand health metrics can provide early signals that demand is strengthening, weakening or getting stuck. The important step is identifying which signals matter for your particular growth objective. If you're entering a new market, awareness may be critical. If awareness is already high but sales are lagging, consideration, preference or brand perceptions may tell you more. 

Intermediate indicators

What customers actually do can tell you a lot. If the data shows consideration is climbing, interesting. It gets more interesting if you see that branded search is climbing a few months later. If the data continues to show this connection, you’ve found a relationship worth investigating.  

Business outcomes

Finally, compare those patterns with the outcomes the business ultimately cares about.

Zappi recommends viewing brand tracking data alongside outcomes such as sales lift and brand penetration to translate changes in brand health into actionable growth levers.

Brand health data is less useful when teams review individual numbers without considering the broader picture. Its power comes from understanding those numbers in context.

Looking at metrics in isolation

As I mentioned above, no single brand metric tells the whole story. 

Instead, the value lies in looking at how the metrics move in relation to business performance. Seeing awareness rise while consideration falls tells a different story than seeing both metrics rise together. And looking at any number alone doesn’t give enough context for what to investigate next. 

The same principle applies across research programs. Connecting brand health with advertising or innovation data can help teams understand whether changes in consumer perceptions correspond with what they're putting into the market. 

Overreacting to short-term fluctuations

It’s easy to overreact to monthly fluctuations, but true change is often only reliable after seeing months of data. By building a longitudinal view, teams can distinguish meaningful changes from normal variation. 

Zappi recommends accumulating about three months of data before drawing conclusions. 

Ignoring competitive benchmarks

Brand health is relative. Holding steady may look reassuring until you discover that a competitor is gaining awareness, consideration or mental availability much faster.

Competitive benchmarks put your results in context. Stable consideration in a stable category may warrant little action. Stable consideration while a challenger rapidly gains ground is a different business problem.

Measuring too infrequently

If brand health is measured only periodically, teams may miss important changes between studies. Continuous tracking gives marketers an up-to-date view they can access when a business question arises, rather than waiting for the next scheduled research cycle.

For example, a competitor launches a major campaign or your team introduces new creative. With continuous data, you can check whether brand metrics are beginning to shift and compare the change with the longer-term trend.

Zappi's Brand Health Tracker collects data continuously and updates KPIs monthly. That doesn't mean teams need to make decisions every month. It means the data is there when they need to assess what's happening.

All of this said, connecting brand health to revenue requires more than choosing the right metrics. Teams also need agreement on what they're trying to achieve. 

Align stakeholders around growth outcomes

Start with the business decisions your brand tracking needs to support. Marketing, insights and finance may use different measures of success, but they should agree on the outcomes they're trying to influence.

The metrics that matter change with the business goal. If you’re entering a new market, you likely want to track awareness and consideration. Established brands protecting their margins may care more about preference, differentiation and pricing power. 

This shifts the conversation from which metrics should go on our dashboard to what we need to know to make better growth decisions.

Supercell offers a good example of making brand tracking part of everyday decision-making. The company uses Zappi to track five live games across 10 markets, with teams able to access the data directly rather than relying on an insights specialist to pull reports. 

Global Marketing Intelligence Lead Leandro Delarue says Supercell wanted a tracker that was “simple, easy to connect with our everyday discussions.” 

Establish metric-to-outcome relationships

Effective brand growth measurement means looking beyond movement in individual metrics to see what tends to happen next. Does consideration typically fall before sales do? Does stronger brand equity show up alongside greater pricing power? Once you know what's typical for your organization, you have a better basis for deciding when to act. 

Move from reporting to forecasting

Once you understand those relationships, brand tracking can become an early-warning system rather than a record of what has already happened.

If consideration has historically weakened before branded search or sales decline, for example, a new downward trend gives marketers an opportunity to investigate before the full commercial impact appears. The same principle applies when brand signals begin moving in a positive direction.

Continuous measurement makes this more useful because teams can compare new signals with historical patterns. 

The goal is to move beyond reporting what happened to understanding what may happen next and what the business should do about it.

Brand health metrics earn their place in the business when they help teams make better decisions. The goal isn't simply to know that awareness increased or consideration fell. It's to understand what changed, what it could mean for growth and whether the business should respond. 

Continuous tracking makes those connections easier to see over time — and gives teams current data when an important decision arises.

Zappi's Brand Health Tracker helps marketers continuously measure brand performance, benchmark against competitors and turn brand health data into insights they can act on.