The CMO's Guide to Data-Conscious Brand Strategy - Brand Health
Matt Bowen • October 27, 2020
At Brandigo we have been pioneers of what we have named data-conscious brand strategy. In our new series of articles, blogs, and podcasts, The CMO’s Guide to Data-Conscious Brand Strategy, we’re going to take a deep dive into what that really means, why it will set your brand and marketing apart from your competition, and break down some of the steps we take to inform the amazing journey we take our clients’ brands on.
And to start things off we shall begin by taking a look at the first stage in the process – ascertaining the health of your brand.
What is data-conscious brand strategy?
Most marketing fails because agencies and in-house teams don’t invest in understanding the authentic desires of customers. So the expensive messaging and content they produce runs wild with irrelevance, often damaging a brand’s health. What they call ‘strategy’ is often a grab bag of semi-educated guesses, lazy attempts to replicate another brand’s wins, and generic ‘insights’ pulled from ubiquitous 3rd party market reports.
Here at Brandigo, we believe there is a different way. A better way that makes use of a potent combination of primary research and a creative vision that ensures brands consistently and powerfully speak to what customers care about most. There are no shortcuts. Speaking with hundreds of customers in tailor-made studies, we uncover the true emotional value a brand’s products and services deliver, as well as the gap between what customers say and what actually drives their buying decisions.
The results shift paradigms. Data-conscious strategy elevates brands above the competition and inspires entire organizations. It cultivates equity—the kind investors, entrepreneurs, and the C-suite fawns over. The kind that leads to real revenue gains and lasting legacies.
Why your brand needs a health check
Measuring brand health helps us to understand exactly how a brand is perceived in the minds of stakeholders, be that customers, employees, competitors, and so on. It goes beyond simply asking if they know of your brand and looks in more detail as to whether or not they know of your brand, and if so, are they compelled to make a purchase for example. It also represents the starting point for developing a truly data-conscious brand strategy.
At Brandigo we use our brand health metrics to measure the awareness (aided and unaided), familiarity, consideration, and usage of a brand, as well as exploring loyalty. And we define each benchmark as follows:
Awareness – has the respondent heard of your brand before?
Familiarity – if they have heard of it, do they know anything about the brand beyond just the name?
Consideration – if they are familiar with your brand, will they consider using you if they are looking for a supplier of your products or services?
Usage – is the respondent currently, or have they ever been, a customer of your brand?
Loyalty – how likely is the respondent to recommend your brand?
How does the health check help formulate a data-conscious brand strategy?
Once you have an idea of how aware, familiar, etc., your stakeholders are of your brand, you can then start to make informed decisions about where to focus your marketing resources.
Let’s say our brand health research has uncovered that although your brand has high awareness and familiarity amongst stakeholders, your consideration metrics are low. As you can see in the graphic below, this data would suggest that your strategy should include a focus on developing a compelling brand promise and communicating this effectively to the market. You might also want to examine how your pricing strategy relates to the perceived value your brand is projecting.
In summary, contributing factors to a fall in the consideration brand health metric can include:
A lack of a singular and/or compelling brand promise
A perceived drop in relevance of service offerings
Ineffective messaging or sales saliency
Off-balance price / value perception
Negative PR, product failures, poor reviews or referrals
What this demonstrates here is that just by taking the first step towards data-conscious brand strategy development with a robust brand health analysis, marketing leaders can identify 5 potential points of focus that will genuinely impact on their offer and ultimately their business growth.
The next stage of the process is to focus on your brand’s value drivers. And that will be the topic of our next article. In the meantime, to find out more about data-conscious brand strategy and how it can revolutionize your marketing, get in touch with us via email or join us on our social media.
Tesla's recent struggles show how controversies can damage a brand. CEO Elon Musk's recent controvercial decisions have alienated a significant portion of Tesla's eco-conscious customer base. The fallout has been severe: Stock Decline: Tesla's stock dropped 36% in Q1 2025, erasing $460B in market cap. Sales Impact: Vehicle deliveries fell 13% year-over-year in Q1 2025, with market share in Europe and Germany plummeting. Customer Trust: Favorability among Democrats dropped 23% from January to July 2024, while Tesla's brand consideration score halved since 2021. This highlights a key lesson: brands risk fallout when taking sides on divisive issues, and this is particularly true in politics. It highlights how important it for brands to remain focused on their core mission, establish authenticity, and earn trust from the market. You may be asking yourself, well hold on, how is this any different that what other brands like Ben and Jerry’s have done over the years. The key difference is that even though they may express views that some may find divisive, these views didn’t counter their core brand essence, in fact it enhanced it. Conflicts Hurting Brand Performance Brand Value Losses Tesla experienced a hit to its brand value following statements from its CEO that many perceived to be divisive or off-brand. Survey results showed that 45% of respondents viewed the impact as "negative," while 40% described it as "extremely negative" [2] . Customer Trust Breakdown Tesla's favorability ratings have sharply declined, particularly across political affiliations:
B2B marketing is a high-stakes game, data is everywhere—but insight is rare. One of the most powerful yet underutilized sources of marketing intelligence is a clear view of your brand’s health. Not vanity metrics, but a deep, diagnostic look at how your brand is perceived at every stage of the buyer’s journey. With perceived being the key word here. This kind of insight doesn’t come from your CRM or website analytics. It comes from targeted audience research that maps how each buyer persona perceives your brand at every key touchpoint in the funnel: awareness, familiarity, consideration, usage, and loyalty. When done right, it’s like getting an X-ray of your entire marketing engine—and your competitors’ too. Think how useful this is for a marketing and revenue team. Defining Brand Health: Perceptions Across the Funnel Brand health isn’t a single number. It’s the sum of how well your brand is performing in the minds of your target audiences—at every step of the funnel: Awareness – Do your ideal customers even know your brand exists? Familiarity – Can they describe what you do and how you’re different? Consideration – Would they include you in their shortlist when making a purchase decision? Usage – Are they choosing you and experiencing the value you promise? Loyalty – Do they stay, recommend, and grow with your brand? When you understand how each of your target personas perceives your brand at these stages, you can pinpoint the exact points where your marketing is working—or where it’s leaking leads and losing revenue. Why You Can’t Rely on Internal Data Alone Here’s the reality: most internal dashboards can only tell you what people do. But they can’t tell you what people think. And what they think determines whether or not they’ll engage with you in the first place. The only way to measure brand health accurately is through targeted audience research—surveys and qualitative insights gathered from your actual buying personas (or those of your competitors). This research reveals how each group perceives you at every stage of the funnel, uncovering blind spots and opportunities that performance data alone can’t provide. The Strategic Power of a Brand Health X-Ray When you can see brand health perceptions by funnel stage and by persona, you unlock powerful advantages for both marketing and revenue teams: Focused Strategy If awareness is high but familiarity is low, you know your messaging isn’t landing. If consideration is weak, you may need to clarify your value proposition or address trust barriers. This enables marketing to focus efforts where the funnel is breaking down—no guesswork. Smarter Budget Allocation Instead of spreading your budget evenly or betting on assumptions, brand health insights show you exactly where to invest to get the highest return. No more overspending at the top of the funnel when the real issue is mid-funnel conversion. Competitive Benchmarking When you include competitor data in your brand health assessment, you can see how buyers perceive your rivals at each stage of the funnel. Are they winning on awareness but losing on loyalty? Are you the most considered, but not the most chosen? This is the kind of clarity that drives smart positioning. The Business Case: Stats That Matter Companies that monitor brand health regularly are 60% more likely to exceed revenue goals. Consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by up to 20%. Brands with strong funnel-wide perception outperform competitors by up to 3X in customer retention and advocacy. To get started, B2B marketers should: Identify Key Personas – Who are your target buyers? Define them clearly. Map the Funnel Stages – Customize the funnel stages to match your sales cycle. Launch Targeted Research – Use surveys, interviews, or brand assessment tools to gather perception data. Analyze and Benchmark – Compare across personas and against competitors. Act on Insights – Use findings to adjust messaging, content, media spend, and sales enablement. Marketing teams are under more pressure than ever to prove impact. By measuring brand health through the lens of funnel-stage perceptions across key personas, you equip your team with the clarity to act with precision—and avoid wasting time and budget on the wrong problems. It’s not just about knowing how your brand is doing. It’s about knowing why—and what to do next. Want help setting up a brand health assessment for your organization? DM me and let's talk about how to build your own X-ray view of your brand and your competitors.