Understanding Brand Health: The Marketing X-Ray Every Marketing and Revenue Team Needs Now More than Ever.
Matt Bowen • April 3, 2025
Understanding Brand Health: The Marketing X-Ray Every Marketing and Revenue Team Needs Now More than Ever.
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.
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:
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