Tracking Brand Equity

When Laura and I started Circa Brand Agency in 2015,

Laura was raising two young boys, both under five at the time. It’s hard to imagine now that, 11 years later, they’re both towering over us.

At the time, I had ample time and she did not. When we were working out compensation, I was quick to share all of my stats: hours worked, clients managed, revenue brought in.

Laura didn’t pull stats. Instead, she pointed out that much of her contribution was harder to measure. She brought an additional decade of experience, relationships and maturity. In just an hour or two a day, she could get an incredible amount done.

I remember that conversation because I knew she was right. And it’s a premise Circa was founded on: some of the most important things are difficult to measure. Quantitative metrics shouldn’t overshadow qualitative value.

Brand equity is one of those things.

Brand equity is difficult to measure. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Brand equity is a relatively easy concept to understand: the value your brand holds in the marketplace.

Measuring it is harder.

Most business leaders understand that brand equity matters. The more difficult questions are:

• How do we know what ours is?
• How do we know if it’s rising or falling?
• How do we know whether someone else is beginning to take our share of the market?

Those questions become especially important when you’re part of an in-house marketing team reporting to executive leadership, or building value within a PE-backed business. In either case, you’re responsible for showing growth.

But tracking brand equity doesn’t require assigning your brand an exact dollar amount. In fact, trying to do so can distract from a much more useful question:

Is our brand getting stronger or weaker?

We’ve seen what can happen in both directions. When Twitter became X, the company walked away from a name and visual identity with decades of global recognition behind them. Volkswagen’s emissions scandal showed how quickly trust built over years can be damaged. On the other end of the spectrum, Apple has built enough equity around its brand to command premium pricing and maintain loyalty in an intensely competitive market.

Different companies, different circumstances. But each illustrates the same thing: brand equity can be built, leveraged and lost, and those shifts have real business consequences.

For most businesses, though, the change won’t come with a headline announcing it. It’s something that happens incrementally, which makes knowing what to watch even more important.

What should you actually track?

1. Value Differentiator: Are we still meaningfully different?

What do you provide that no one else can?

Track your competitors and pay attention to how their positioning changes. Talk to sales and marketing about who you’re losing business to and why. Look at win/loss data and listen for whether customers can articulate the same value your brand claims to provide.

A differentiator isn’t particularly valuable if your competitors have started saying the same thing or your customers don’t recognize it to begin with.

2. Audience: Are we creating value for the right people?

Customer surveys, online reviews, sales conversations and customer interviews can all provide useful signals about how your audience perceives you.

The important thing is consistency: establish what you want to understand and keep asking the same questions over time.

You’re looking for movement. Are the associations you want becoming stronger? Are new concerns emerging? Are you attracting the customers you actually want?

3. Purpose: Is the organization aligned around what we’re building?

Brand equity isn’t created by marketing alone. Your organization has to deliver what the brand promises.

That makes internal alignment worth tracking, too. Do employees understand why the business exists? Can they articulate what makes it different? Do the people closest to customers believe the organization is delivering on that promise?

Internal research can reveal disconnects long before they become visible externally.

Movement over numbers

At Circa, we’ve spent the past decade thinking about how to make something inherently qualitative more useful to the people responsible for business performance.

Because we know that what gets measured is what matters, we track brand equity for our clients on a quarterly basis using a combination of qualitative surveys, market research and documented observations.

Fortunately for our clients, their part only requires a few minutes of input once a quarter.

We’re not looking to declare that a brand is “worth” $50 million this quarter and $52 million the next. Our aim is to establish a baseline, track the same signals consistently and identify meaningful movement over time.

Consider a PE-backed company growing quickly through acquisition. Revenue is increasing, locations are being added. From a financial perspective, things appear to be moving in the right direction.

But the brand tracker starts showing something else.

Customers are becoming less likely to identify the company’s primary differentiator. Reviews increasingly mention inconsistent experiences between locations. The sales team reports that competitors are beginning to make similar claims. Employees at newly acquired locations struggle to articulate what the larger brand stands for.

No single data point tells you what the brand is worth.

Together, they tell you that brand equity may be eroding, potentially well before that erosion shows up in revenue.

If you’re responsible for brand equity, you need to be able to see it.

Financial performance can tell you a lot about the health of a business. But it can’t always tell you what’s happening beneath the surface of the brand creating that value.

That’s why tracking brand equity matters.

It can be tempting to reduce something complex and qualitative to a single number. But the real value lies in creating a consistent way to understand where your brand stands, recognize when something meaningful is changing and make more informed decisions about where to invest.

For in-house marketing teams, that creates a stronger connection between the work you’re doing every day and the larger business goals you’re responsible for supporting. For executive teams and investors, it provides another way to understand whether you’re building an asset that will continue to create value over time.

Don’t let the pursuit of precision hold you back. Focus instead on visibility and consistency.

About the author

Tori Thomas, CEO & Co-Founder

Tori Thomas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Circa Brand Agency, where she helps organizations build brands designed to endure.

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